Clochan, Cill Mhic An Domhnaigh, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Clochan, Cill Mhic An Domhnaigh, Co. Kerry

On the lower south-eastern slopes of Mount Eagle, overlooking Ventry Harbour and Dingle Bay, there is a place where thirteen tiny stone chambers once stood inside a single large enclosure.

The site is known as Cathair na Maoilinne, and what makes it quietly remarkable is the scale of those chambers. A clochaun is a small dry-stone corbelled hut, typically associated with early medieval monastic or settlement activity in the west of Ireland, but these were extraordinarily compact even by that standard. None exceeded 2.66 metres in their widest dimension, and the smallest was just 1.29 metres in diameter, barely enough to lie down in. They came in a variety of forms, circular, oval, rectangular, and D-shaped, with two conjoined pairs among them, all arranged within an oval stone-walled enclosure measuring 62 metres by 43 metres.

When the antiquarian R. A. S. Macalister recorded the site in 1899, the layout was still legible enough to describe in some detail. A rock shelter and a possible additional clochaun lay roughly fourteen metres to the south of the main enclosure. What survives today is considerably less. The enclosure has shrunk in legibility to an ill-defined area of around 40 metres in diameter, its southern boundary marked by only a faint bank of earth and stone, its northern edge by a low scarp between half a metre and one metre high. Of the thirteen chambers, just three mounds of collapsed stone remain, sitting in the north-western quadrant of the enclosure. The rock shelter to the south has fared somewhat better. It measures 4 metres by 2 metres internally and is partly shaped by a ruined wall and partly by natural outcropping rock. A short stretch of walling nearby, 1.6 metres long and 0.6 metres high, may represent the northern side of one of the clochauns that once stood beside it.

The site sits in rough pastureland, which gives a fair indication of what approaching it involves. The landscape is unimproved and the remains are subtle, the kind that reward patience and a close eye rather than revealing themselves immediately. The rock shelter, being partly formed by natural geology, is the most visible surviving element and offers the clearest sense of how the site might once have functioned as a place of shelter or occupation on this exposed Atlantic hillside.

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