Clochan, An Bóthar Breac, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Clochan, An Bóthar Breac, Co. Kerry

When early Ordnance Survey mappers passed through the moorland north of the Owenalondrig river valley in Kerry, they either missed this structure entirely or thought so little of it that a later edition recorded it merely as a sheep-fold.

Neither description does it justice. Sitting at the western edge of a wide, open stretch of bogland, caught between enclosed farmland to the south and the central mountain ridge to the north, the site is something considerably older and more deliberate than a pen for animals.

What survives is a clochan, a drystone corbelled hut of the kind associated with early Christian hermits and monks on the Dingle Peninsula, set inside a roughly circular stone-walled enclosure that may once have been a cashel, the term for a stone-ringed farmstead or ecclesiastical enclosure common across early medieval Ireland. The enclosure entrance faces south-east and is formed by a passage between one and a half and four metres long, its sides lined with upright stone slabs, giving it a deliberately constructed character rather than a simple gap in a wall. The clochan itself sits within this enclosure with its own entrance facing east, as was conventional, towards the rising sun. Its walls are one and a half metres thick, still standing to a height of around three quarters of a metre, and enclose an interior just three and a half metres in diameter, a space suited to solitary occupation rather than communal use. The site was recorded and described by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey, which brought systematic attention to the extraordinary concentration of early medieval remains across Corca Dhuibhne.

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