Clochan, Clonamery, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Settlement Sites

Clochan, Clonamery, Co. Kilkenny

On the highest point of a ridge in rough pasture west of Clonamery church, there sits what remains of an early monastic dwelling, reduced now to a low mound of stone that barely registers in the landscape unless you know what you are looking at.

A clochan, sometimes spelled clochaun, is a drystone beehive-shaped hut, corbelled inward course by course until the walls meet at the top, the kind of small, austere cell associated with early Celtic monasticism in Ireland. Here, the structure survives only as a roughly circular cairn, measuring about 7.4 metres east to west at its base and rising to around 1.4 metres on its downslope side, with traces of kerbing defining its western and north-western edges.

Writing in 1905, the historian William Carrigan described two such clochans at this spot, sitting five or six perches, roughly 25 to 30 metres, from the graveyard wall of the medieval church. He recorded one at approximately 4.42 metres in diameter and the other at 3.35 metres, and identified them as foundations of the beehive-shaped stone houses connected with ancient Celtic monasteries. By the time the site was surveyed more recently, only one of the two structures remained visible at ground level, and even that has collapsed into a cairn form. There is a single stone with its flat face turned towards the interior, a possible remnant of internal kerbing, though the structure is too disturbed to read with any confidence. What Carrigan could still recognise as architectural foundations has since settled further into the hillside.

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