Clochan, Com Dhíneol Theas, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Clochan, Com Dhíneol Theas, Co. Kerry

At a spot known as Púicín na bhFothrach, on the southern side of the Dingle Peninsula in Kerry, three small stone structures survive embedded in the walls and corners of an ordinary field.

They are clochans, the beehive-shaped dry-stone huts built without mortar that appear across the Dingle landscape, their corbelled roofs constructed by laying each successive ring of stones slightly inward until the courses meet at the top. What makes this particular group quietly unsettling is not what remains but what is missing: four of the original seven clochans here were dismantled at some point, their stones recycled into the high enclosing wall of the field itself. The three survivors were simply absorbed into that same wall rather than demolished, so the boundary that consumed their companions now holds them in place.

The scholar R.A.S. Macalister noted the site in 1899, by which point the reduction from seven to three had already occurred. His account describes the second structure as five-sided on plan, an unusual geometry for a clochan, though it is now almost entirely obscured by collapse and the accumulated debris of field clearance. The first, set into the north wall of the field, is the most intact: an oval chamber measuring roughly 3.1 by 1.5 metres internally, just 1.5 metres high, with a lintelled wall-cupboard still visible inside. A lintel is simply a flat stone laid horizontally across an opening to bear the weight above it, a small domestic detail that speaks to a careful interior. The third survives only as a 2.5-metre projection against the east wall, its interior inaccessible. According to local record, the largest of the original group was still being used as a dwelling around 1847, the year the Famine was at its most severe, which places even a ruined corbelled hut in a different light entirely.

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