Clochan, An Tseantóir, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Clochan, An Tseantóir, Co. Kerry

A boundary wall that curves for no obvious practical reason, and a small recess scooped into its base, are easy things to walk past without a second thought.

On the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry, however, those two modest features have drawn enough archaeological attention to suggest that something older and more deliberate lies beneath or behind them. The wall in question runs along the eastern edge of a children's burial ground at An Tseantóir, and its pronounced curve is read as a possible indicator that it was built over, or incorporates, the remains of a clochán, the type of dry-stone corbelled hut associated with early medieval and early Christian Ireland, typically beehive-shaped and constructed without mortar.

The small recess on the inner face of the wall is the other telling detail. Measuring roughly half a metre wide, just over half a metre high, and a metre deep, it sits at ground level, semi-circular in form. Its presence near what is identified as a possible leacht, a low commemorative stone monument often found at early religious sites, places it within a cluster of features that together point to a site of some antiquity and significance. Children's burial grounds, known in Irish as cilliní, were used well into the nineteenth century for the interment of unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated ground, and they frequently occupy sites with much earlier sacred or ritual associations. The layering here, a possible clochán beneath a boundary wall beside a leacht beside a cillín, is typical of how sacred landscape accumulates in the west of Ireland, each generation adapting rather than abandoning what came before.

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