Clochan, Capnagower, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Settlement Sites
On Clare Island off the Mayo coast, there is a stone structure so small that a person could not stand upright inside it.
Its interior measures roughly a metre by eighty centimetres, with a maximum height of eighty-five centimetres, and the entrance is only forty centimetres wide, with no formal lintel or jambs to frame it. This is the Labbabreed, a name that translates from the Irish as St Bridget's Bed, and it sits within an enclosure, about a metre and a half north of a stone altar. The structure is a clochan, a type of small drystone building with a corbelled roof, where the walls are built inward course by course until flat capstones can close the gap overhead. Here, three flat slabs do that work. The walls are crudely laid, angular limestone blocks of varying sizes, gapped in many places, and the sidewalls shift from a roughly rectangular base to a more circular form as they rise.
The antiquarian T. J. Westropp visited the site and wrote about it in 1911, describing the structure variously as a cell, a hut, and a clochán, and recording an account of a cure said to have been effected within the labba itself. He was already uncertain about how much of what stood before him was genuinely old. He considered the structure to have been rebuilt at some point, though not as recently as the surrounding cashel, the stone-walled enclosure in whose north-eastern corner it sits, and he speculated carefully about how far the original foundations might be ancient. He noted and illustrated what he believed to be earlier foundation lines running roughly three feet south of the present structure's face, but later examination found no definite surface trace of these. The interior is slightly sunken, dry despite the crude construction, and littered with small rounded stones, which may themselves be the residue of votive or ritual practice.
