Clochan, Gleann Fán, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the lower southern slopes of Mount Eagle, overlooking Dingle Bay, a cluster of ancient stone huts sits within a sub-oval cashel, a type of dry-stone enclosure wall used in early medieval Ireland to demarcate a settlement or farmstead.
Known as Caher Conor, or Cathair na gConchúrach in Irish, the site contains five surviving structures in varying degrees of completeness, along with the ghost outlines of others that have since disappeared. What makes it particularly worth pausing over is not just its age but its legibility: you can still read, in stone, the decisions made by whoever built here, from the careful corbelling of the roofs to the deliberate placement of orthostats, upright standing stones, flanking the entrance of one hut's inner passage.
The corbelled clocháns, dry-stone beehive-shaped huts in which courses of stone are laid so that each one slightly overlaps the one below until the opening closes at the top, are the site's most complete features. The largest of the three surviving examples measures five metres across internally, with walls still standing to nearly three metres. A souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage whose uses likely included storage and perhaps refuge, opens into this hut at ground level just south of the entrance. A shared rectangular enclosure connects two of the huts, and when the antiquary George Victor Du Noyer visited in the nineteenth century, he noted two small chambers in the corners of this enclosure, describing them as still perfect. By the time R. A. S. Macalister made his own record, both chambers were already in decline; no trace of them remains today. The site's condition has shifted considerably since that first nineteenth-century documentation, a reminder that even stone is not static.