Clochan, Feaghmaan, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
At the edge of an ancient enclosure on the Iveragh Peninsula in south Kerry, a half-buried structure raises a question that no one has yet been able to answer with certainty.
Two upright stones stand just to the south of it, one a metre tall, the other less than half that. They might be incidental, left over from some other purpose entirely. Or they might mark graves. The ambiguity is not the result of incomplete investigation so much as the genuine difficulty of reading a landscape that has been accumulating meaning, and losing it, for a very long time.
The structure itself is a clochan, a term for a dry-stone corbelled hut of early medieval Irish origin, typically associated with monastic or hermitic settlement. Only the western half survives in any legible form, its wall still measuring 1.3 metres thick where it remains, enclosing an interior roughly 3 metres in diameter, now choked with loose fallen stone. The foundations sit close to the enclosing bank of a larger enclosure to the west-southwest, suggesting this was once a subsidiary element within a more complex arrangement of spaces. Françoise Henry, the art historian whose mid-twentieth-century fieldwork did much to map early Christian monuments across Ireland, documented the site in 1957, and the plan she produced remains a point of reference for understanding what survives.