Clochan, Eoghanacht, Co. Galway

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Settlement Sites

Clochan, Eoghanacht, Co. Galway

A small stone structure on the Aran Islands managed to go unrecorded until agricultural fieldwork brought it back into focus sometime between 2014 and 2018.

It is a clochan, a type of drystone beehive hut built using corbelling, a technique in which each course of stones projects slightly inward over the one below until the courses meet at the top, creating a self-supporting roof without mortar. This particular example, at the north-western end of Inis Mór in the townland of Eoghanacht, has walls nearly two metres thick and stands 2.3 metres high, with an interior diameter of four metres and a narrow entrance facing south. What makes it quietly strange is its afterlife: at some point the northern half was squared off and pressed into service as a shed, reducing that section to between 0.4 and one metre in height. The building was not demolished or cleared away; it was simply adapted, absorbed into the working fabric of the landscape.

The structure came to light during the AranLIFE Farming Project, an initiative running from 2014 to 2018 that examined traditional land use across the Aran Islands. During that fieldwork it was discovered that the clochan had been incorporated into a later field wall running east to west, meaning that at some stage the wall-builders found it more practical to build around the structure than to remove it. Internally, well-defined corbelling survives at the south and south-west; externally it is visible on the eastern face, though the southern section has been partially robbed out, its stones likely reused elsewhere on the holding. The northern half is partially overgrown with ivy. Roughly 130 metres to the north-north-east, a second clochan stands in the same area, suggesting this part of the island once held a small cluster of these structures, the remains of an earlier pattern of habitation or use now largely swallowed by later field systems.

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