Clochan, An Ghairfeanaigh, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Settlement Sites

Clochan, An Ghairfeanaigh, Co. Kerry

On the eastern slopes of Sugarloaf hill on the Dingle Peninsula, a ringfort sits above a steep glen carved out by the Garfinny river.

What makes this particular site quietly unusual is the presence, recorded on Ordnance Survey maps, of two clochans within it. A clochan is a drystone corbelled hut, roughly beehive-shaped, built without mortar by carefully overlapping stones until they meet at a single point overhead. They are associated with early medieval settlement, and finding two of them tucked inside the same enclosure hints at a domestic arrangement, small and self-contained, that once looked out over this river valley.

The enclosure itself is a univallate rath, meaning a roughly circular earthwork defined by a single bank and ditch, the most common form of ringfort found across Ireland and typically dated to the early medieval period, broadly the sixth to tenth centuries. The two clochans were positioned against the inner face of the bank, one to the north-east and one to the south-south-west. A slight kink in the southern bank, along with surviving revetment walling, may mark where the second structure once stood, its outline now only faintly legible in the earthwork itself. The site was documented as part of J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Corca Dhuibhne region, a careful and detailed record of the Dingle Peninsula's extraordinary concentration of early remains.

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