At Baile Ristín on the Dingle Peninsula, the record points to four clochans, the distinctive dry-stone beehive huts associated with early Christian and medieval settlement in this part of Kerry, yet no definite trace of them survives above ground. What remains instead are four sheep-pens or shelters, the kind of low, rough enclosures that farmers have thrown up across these hillsides for centuries. The twist is that at least three of those pens appear to have been built on the footprints of the earlier huts, and partly from the same stones. The original structures were not simply abandoned; they were quietly cannibalised.

The clochans were first noted by F. H. A. Aalen in 1964, who recorded their presence in this area in a study published that year. By the time J. Cuppage conducted the wider Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, published in 1986, the picture had already blurred considerably. The survey catalogued the four sheep shelters but could find no unambiguous remains of the huts themselves, leaving open the question of how much of the original fabric had been reused and how much simply lost. It is a pattern repeated elsewhere on the peninsula, where later agricultural activity has folded earlier settlement evidence into itself, making clean distinctions between periods difficult to draw.