Clochan, Eochaill, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Settlement Sites
In the west of County Galway, a prehistoric dry-stone building has become, in effect, a sheep shed.
The structure at Eochaill began its recorded life as a clochan, a corbelled stone hut of the kind built in Ireland from early medieval times onward, in which courses of flat stones are laid in overlapping rings until they close at the top without the need for mortar or timber. By the time George Henry Kinahan noted it in 1869, it was already ruined. Today, what survives is a roughly circular stone cairn measuring approximately ten metres north to south and just under ten metres east to west, its interior packed with rubble and fitted out with a modern lintelled sheep shelter.
Kinahan's 1869 description is the earliest known record of the site, and even then he was cataloguing a ruin rather than a standing structure. The transformation from clochan to cairn to improvised animal pen follows a pattern common enough in the west of Ireland, where field clearance, stone robbing, and practical agricultural need have quietly dismantled many early structures over the centuries. The site sits on level ground to the south-west of a nearby monument known as Clochán an Phúca, its current condition documented by Tim Robinson in 1980.