Clochan, An Baile Beag, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Settlement Sites

Clochan, An Baile Beag, Co. Kerry

On the lower eastern slopes of a narrow valley running north-east from Dingle town, an ancient boundary wall does quiet duty dividing two large fields.

That it exists at all as a working agricultural boundary is part of what makes it easy to overlook; the structure has been absorbed into the everyday landscape of An Baile Beag rather than set apart from it.

What draws attention, or once did, is what stood nearby. The first edition of the Ordnance Survey map recorded a small circular structure at the south-eastern side of the site, identified as a probable clochaun. A clochaun is a dry-stone beehive hut, a building technique used in Ireland from early medieval times onward and found in particular concentration on the Dingle Peninsula, where the landscape is dense with early Christian and prehistoric remains. That small circular form no longer survives, making it one of the quietly vanished features that the 19th-century surveyors caught just in time. The site was documented in J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Corca Dhuibhne region, a detailed record of the Dingle Peninsula that brought many such overlooked structures into the formal record.

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Pete F
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