Cloghauns, Garranebane, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Settlement Sites

Cloghauns, Garranebane, Co. Kerry

Just west of Cahersiveen, on a slight rise close to the southern bank of the Valentia River, a heavily overgrown square enclosure contains something that takes a moment to parse: two circular stone huts, built side by side and connected by a passage, sitting at the centre of what was once a sacred enclosure.

The huts are corbelled drystone structures, meaning their walls were constructed without mortar, with stones carefully overlapping inward to form a self-supporting roof. Both are badly deteriorated now, their interiors choked with loose stone, but the form is still legible. The eastern hut measures 4.45 metres in internal diameter and retains traces of its own entrance on the south-south-east side, as well as the communicating passage that once linked it to its western companion, which is slightly smaller at 4.25 metres across.

The enclosure itself measures 32 metres square internally, bounded partly by an older rubble wall faced with upright slabs on both sides and partly by a wall of more recent construction. No original entrance survives, or at least none is apparent. An east-west row of intermittent upright slabs crosses the interior roughly ten metres from the northern limit, dividing the space. To the south of this internal division sit the conjoined huts, a leacht (a low commemorative stone cairn, typically associated with early Christian devotional practice), and a stone cross. The south-east quadrant holds a large number of uninscribed upright slabs, which are thought to relate to the site's use as a ceallúnach, an informal burial ground for unbaptised infants or others excluded from consecrated ground, a feature found at a number of early ecclesiastical sites across Ireland. O'Sullivan and Sheehan documented the site in 1996, and their description remains the primary account of what survives here.

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