Clochan, Cill Mhic An Domhnaigh, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Clochan, Cill Mhic An Domhnaigh, Co. Kerry

On the lower south-eastern slopes of Mount Eagle, above Ventry Harbour and Dingle Bay, there is a site that rewards close attention precisely because so little of it is left.

Known as Cathair na Maoilinne, it was once a substantial oval stone enclosure, roughly 62 metres by 43 metres, containing thirteen tiny dry-stone chambers called clocháns. A clochán is a corbelled stone cell, built without mortar, the stones layered inward until they meet at the top, a technique with roots stretching back through early medieval monasticism and possibly earlier. At Cathair na Maoilinne, these were exceptionally small; the largest measured no more than 2.66 metres across, and the smallest just 1.29 metres in diameter. Some were circular, some oval, some rectangular, some D-shaped in plan, and at least two pairs were conjoined. What their precise purpose was remains uncertain, though groupings of small stone cells within an enclosure on the Dingle Peninsula are often associated with early Christian monastic or anchoritic activity.

When the archaeologist R. A. S. Macalister recorded the site in 1899, the enclosure and its chambers were still legible in the landscape. By the time of Judith Cuppage's Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey in 1986, the picture had deteriorated considerably, and things have not improved since. What survives today is an ill-defined area roughly 40 metres in diameter, its southern edge marked by a faint bank of earth and stone, its northern edge by a low scarp between half a metre and one metre high. Of the thirteen chambers, only three mounds of displaced stone remain, clustered in the north-western quadrant. To the south of the main enclosure, however, a rock shelter and a possible further clochán are still extant. The shelter, measuring 4 metres by 2 metres internally, is formed partly by a ruined wall and partly by natural outcropping rock, with a short stretch of walling nearby that may represent the northern side of another cell.

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