Clochan, An Mhuiríoch, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Settlement Sites

Clochan, An Mhuiríoch, Co. Kerry

On the low-lying eastern shore of Smerwick Harbour, a small circular structure lay completely buried until 1967, when a farmer clearing the ground for tillage inadvertently brought it back into the light.

What emerged was modest in scale but quietly puzzling: a drystone enclosure just three metres across internally, its walls standing up to a metre high and flush with the surrounding ground surface, as if the land had simply grown up around it over the centuries. Near the upper courses, the stonework showed the beginnings of corbelling, the technique by which each successive layer of stone is angled slightly inward to form a roof without mortar, a method long associated with early Irish dry-stone building.

Inside the enclosure, slightly east of centre, lay a carefully constructed pit, roughly a metre by 1.3 metres and about 0.7 metres deep, its sides lined with upright sandstone slabs and finished with flat stones laid across the top edges. When the structure was inspected by O'Kelly of University College Cork following its discovery, the pit still contained a deposit of burnt material, layered in yellow, grey, and black striations, suggesting that fires had been lit there repeatedly over time, not once but in distinct successive episodes. No artefacts were recovered. The structure resisted easy classification: it may have been the foundation of a clochán, the beehive-shaped dry-stone hut found elsewhere on the Dingle Peninsula, or it may have served as a corn-drying kiln, a small facility used to dry grain before milling. Supporting the latter reading is a local tradition, recorded at the time, that wheat was cultivated in these same fields roughly two hundred years before the structure's rediscovery, a detail that places possible use somewhere in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century.

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