Clochan, Cill Mhuire, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
Sometimes the most telling thing about a place is its absence.
At Cill Mhuire on the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry, Ordnance Survey maps once marked a circular enclosure, the kind of roughly defined boundary that so often turns out to enclose early Christian or pre-Christian remains. Today, nothing of it can be seen above ground.
Within that vanished enclosure, a researcher named Curran recorded traces of two clochans, the small dry-stone beehive huts built without mortar that are closely associated with early medieval monastic life along the western seaboard of Ireland. The Dingle Peninsula has a notable concentration of these structures, and their presence here, paired with the placename Cill Mhuire, meaning the church or cell of Mary, suggests a site of some early religious significance. The archaeological survey of the Corca Dhuibhne area, published by J. Cuppage in 1986, catalogued the site among many others on this historically dense stretch of coastline, though even by that point the remains were described only as traces. Whatever stood here has since been entirely absorbed back into the landscape, leaving the OS map notation as the last legible record of its outline.