Clochan, Eochaill, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Settlement Sites

Clochan, Eochaill, Co. Galway

A field in Eochaill, on the Aran Islands, holds the memory of two early stone structures that no longer exist in any visible form.

The clochans, a term for the dry-stone corbelled huts associated with early Christian monasticism and rural settlement in the west of Ireland, were already gone by the time anyone thought to record them carefully. What remains above ground today is nothing: level, cleared pastureland where two circular buildings once stood.

The only detailed account comes from Kinahan, writing in 1869, who described what he found after two mounds, referred to as cnocáns, had been dismantled and their interiors laid open. The cells beneath were circular, roughly 24 feet (7.3 metres) in diameter, and appeared to have been built in the classic beehive form, with courses of stone corbelled inward until they met at the top, requiring no mortar and no centring timber to hold them. The site is recorded as part of Baile na mBocht, a cluster of related monuments in the area. By the time Tim Robinson was documenting the landscape in 1980, the clochans themselves had vanished entirely. Three rectangular dry-stone structures are visible in the field today, including an animal shelter and two longer, partly grassed-over remains, and it is likely that stone robbed from the original clochans was reused in building them. The dimensions of the earlier cells, so carefully noted by Kinahan, now exist only on paper.

The site sits in ordinary-looking pasture, and there is nothing on the surface to signal what was once here. The interest lies precisely in that absence: a place where the archaeology is known only through a single nineteenth-century description of demolition already underway, and where the materials of the original structures were almost certainly recycled into the field walls and shelters that replaced them.

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