Clochan, Ceathrú An Teampaill, Co. Galway

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Settlement Sites

Clochan, Ceathrú An Teampaill, Co. Galway

Tucked into the north-west corner of a field in Ceathrú An Teampaill on the Aran Islands, a small stone structure sat unrecorded until relatively recently, its existence absorbed quietly into the landscape around it.

Partially built into a later field wall, it is the kind of monument that generations of farmers would have walked past without much thought, its original purpose long since dissolved into the practical business of enclosing land.

The structure is a clochan, a type of dry-stone hut built using corbelling, a technique in which each course of stone is laid slightly inward over the one below, gradually closing the space toward a roof without the use of mortar or timber. This particular example is subcircular in plan and small by any measure, reaching a maximum internal width of around two metres and a surviving height of between 1.6 and 1.8 metres on its best-preserved arc, from the north around to the east, where three to four courses of corbelling remain visible on the internal wall-face. The west half of the structure tells a different story: rubble has filled much of that section, and later stonework has squared off the wall at that end, suggesting it was at some point incorporated into or modified by whoever was building or maintaining the field boundaries around it. The monument came to light during fieldwork carried out as part of the AranLIFE Farming Project, which ran between 2014 and 2018 and documented the landscape and heritage of the islands alongside its agricultural survey work.

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