Hut site, Baile Na Leacan, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On a steep, south-easterly facing slope in Baile na Leacan on the Dingle Peninsula, a small stone structure sits with a name that hints at something more than simple shelter.
Clochán na hEaglaise, the Church Beehive Hut, is a corbelled drystone clochán, a type of dry-stone building in which courses of stone are laid so that each ring slightly overhangs the one below, eventually closing into a domed roof without mortar or timber. This one measures 3.5 metres across and stands 2.04 metres high internally, with two niches cut into the interior walls. Attached to its exterior, just north of the north-east entrance, is a small subsidiary chamber, sub-rectangular in plan, roofed with flat slabs, and measuring roughly 1.4 by 0.8 metres internally with a height of just 0.65 metres. It is barely large enough to crouch in, and its purpose is unclear.
The name carries a local tradition recorded by An Seabhac in 1939: that during the Penal Laws, when Catholic worship was suppressed in Ireland and priests celebrated Mass at outdoor or concealed locations, this remote hillside structure served as one such gathering place. The clandestine topography is persuasive enough. A possible cross-inscribed stone associated with the site was recorded by the Cork and Kerry Field Club in 1949, but subsequent searches have failed to locate it, leaving that particular thread unresolved. What does survive is an unusually deliberate approach route: a stone-free, zig-zagging track roughly 150 metres long descends from the hut down the otherwise boulder-strewn and scree-covered hillside, its lower edge marked by a line of boulders and upright stones. Whether this was a processional path, a practical route for people gathering in difficult terrain, or something older entirely, it gives the site a purposeful quality that a simple shepherd's refuge would not ordinarily demand.