Clochan, Corr Áille, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the steep north-eastern slopes of Reenconnell, on the Dingle Peninsula, a cluster of early stone buildings sits quietly alongside a path that has carried pilgrims towards the summit of Brandon Mountain for centuries.
The path is known as the Saint's Road, and the structures beside it are clochans, a term for the beehive-shaped dry-stone huts built without mortar, their walls corbelled inward course by course until they close at the top. What makes this particular grouping unusual is not just the huts themselves, but the layered complexity of what has accumulated around them: a roughly oval enclosure containing one clochan, two leachts (low, flat-topped stone monuments associated with early Christian commemoration), a cross-slab, and graves that point to the site's later use as a calluragh, a burial ground traditionally used for unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated ground.
Two further clochans stand just outside the enclosure to the north-east, built in a way that uses the enclosure wall itself as part of their structure, a practical economy that suggests these buildings were conceived together rather than accumulated haphazardly over time. The builders even cut a rough terrace into the hillside to accommodate the two outer huts, facing the eastern edge of that terrace with dry-stone masonry for a length of around eleven metres. The better-preserved of the outer huts is seven to eight metres in diameter externally, with corbelled walls still standing nearly 1.75 metres high. A lintelled opening in its south-western wall leads into a souterrain, an underground passage or chamber built from dry stone, which runs north-west along the line of the enclosure wall; it is now inaccessible but visible at the entrance. The third hut, smaller and more damaged, retains a wall height of only about 0.4 metres near its south-east entrance. These details were documented in J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Corca Dhuibhne region, and they place this site within a broader tradition of early monastic or hermitic settlement along the pilgrimage approaches to Brandon.
The site sits on the eastern side of the Saint's Road, which still functions as a walking route towards the summit of Brandon Mountain. The approach follows the north-eastern slopes of Reenconnell, and the gradient is described as fairly steep. Visitors walking the Saint's Road would pass the enclosure and its associated structures without necessarily recognising what they are; the corbelled walls, worn low by centuries of exposure and collapse, read more easily as rubble than as architecture until you are close enough to trace their curves.