Hut site, Derrynafinnia, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the south-east-facing slopes of The East Pap of Dana, one of the twin peaks in Kerry known collectively as the Paps of Anu, a small circular structure sits half-swallowed by bog and heather.
It is easy to walk past without noticing; the drystone wall that once defined it rises only around thirty centimetres above the surrounding ground, and the interior is little more than a scatter of tumbled rubble. Yet the outline of a human-scale space, roughly 3.5 metres across, is still legible if you know where to look.
The hut was built using drystone construction, a technique requiring no mortar, in which stones are carefully laid so that their own weight holds the structure together. The wall survives reasonably well along its western and eastern arc but has collapsed entirely on the eastern side, leaving the stonework in a jumbled state. A narrow entrance, just forty centimetres wide, faces east. Along the south-eastern exterior, a curving stone wall of about 3.7 metres runs close against the hut, possibly serving as a windbreak or an enclosure for animals. To the north, the structure was cut slightly into the hillside, a common technique for levelling the floor and providing some shelter from the slope. A second hut site lies roughly ten metres to the north, and the remains of a field wall survive about seventy metres to the east, suggesting that this was once a small cluster of activity rather than a solitary shelter. Whether these structures date to the early medieval period, the post-medieval era of transhumance farming, or some other phase of upland land use is not recorded, but the grouping of hut and field boundary is a pattern familiar from seasonal settlement across Irish hill landscapes. Dense heather now covers the entire area, softening the outlines and making the site genuinely difficult to distinguish from its surroundings at ground level.