Hut site, Mangerton, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Mangerton, Co. Kerry

On the south-west-facing slope of Mangerton Mountain in County Kerry, tucked into a sheltered hollow among rough hill pasture, there is a circular structure so reduced by time that it barely registers as architecture at all.

Its diameter is just two metres, its collapsed drystone walls now only about twenty centimetres high and sixty centimetres thick, and loose stones are scattered across what was once its interior. What makes it quietly interesting is the care with which it was originally made: the eastern portion of the floor was cut into the hillslope, while the western portion sits raised, the whole thing levelled out by hand so that whoever used it had a flat surface to work or sleep on. That small act of practical engineering, carried out at some unknown point in the past, is almost all that survives.

The site sits alongside two related features. Sixteen metres to the west lies another possible hut of similar character, and immediately to the north runs a relict field boundary, the faint trace of an enclosure system that once organised this stretch of mountain ground. Together, the three features suggest a small episode of upland activity, perhaps seasonal grazing, perhaps something more permanent, conducted by people who knew how to read a hillside and build accordingly. Drystone construction of this kind, using unmortared stone laid without any binding material, was common across Irish uplands for centuries, and structures this modest are easily overlooked or mistaken for natural tumbles of rock.

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Pete F
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