Clochan, Eochaill, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Settlement Sites
At Eochaill in County Galway, two low humps of stone sit close together in a field, easy to overlook and difficult to read.
What they represent, most likely, is a conjoined clochan, the term for a dry-stone corbelled hut of early medieval type, built without mortar by layering flat stones inward until they meet at a rough apex. This particular example is in very poor condition, but its footprint survives: an oval chamber roughly 4.8 metres along its longer axis, with a smaller subcircular structure attached to its western side, measuring about 3.9 metres east to west and 3 metres north to south. The pairing of two chambers built against one another is what makes the site unusual, suggesting a more complex arrangement than the single-cell huts more commonly encountered.
The site sits within the townland group known as Baile na mBocht and forms the southernmost point of a cluster of four related monuments. In 1869, the geologist and antiquarian George Henry Kinahan recorded this group, describing them collectively as the "Ruins of two Fosleac and two Ointigh", terms from Irish referring broadly to stone structures and dwellings. Kinahan's note is brief, but it fixes a mid-nineteenth-century moment when the ruins were already reduced enough to be catalogued as remnants rather than standing buildings. The site is one of several in the immediate area that together suggest a concentration of early stone-built activity at Eochaill, though the precise dating and function of any individual structure here remains uncertain.