Cloghauns, Baile Na Bhfionnúrach, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Settlement Sites

Cloghauns, Baile Na Bhfionnúrach, Co. Kerry

On the lower western slopes of Brandon Mountain in County Kerry, two small stone buildings sit joined together, their walls built without mortar, their roofs corbelled inward in the ancient technique of overlapping dry stones that eventually close to a point overhead.

What makes this pair of clocháns, as these beehive-shaped huts are known in Irish, particularly unusual is not the structures themselves but what runs beneath and through one of them: a souterrain, an underground passage that meanders partly inside the thickness of the hut wall and partly beneath the ground outside it, changing direction several times before petering out as an earth-cut tunnel.

The two huts are conjoined but distinct. The southern one has its own entrance facing north-north-west and retains three niches set into the interior wall, small recesses likely used for storage or perhaps for lamps. An internal division within the hut appears to be a later addition rather than part of the original design. The northern hut, slightly smaller at around 4.2 metres in diameter and 1.85 metres in height, is reached through a lintelled passage and it is here that the souterrain opens off the base of the eastern wall. A souterrain is an underground stone-lined or earth-cut passage associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, and their precise function remains debated, with storage and refuge both proposed. This one is especially intricate: from a low lintelled opening just half a metre square, a drystone-built channel runs east, then turns south, before the construction shifts from dressed stone to bare earth-cut tunnel, continuing east and then north-east. The total passage covers several metres of subterranean travel through at least four changes of direction. The survey data recorded here derives from J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, Corca Dhuibhne, which catalogued the remarkable density of early Christian and prehistoric monuments across this part of Kerry.

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