Clochan, Fán, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Settlement Sites

Clochan, Fán, Co. Kerry

On a south-facing slope above Dingle Bay, two ancient stone huts sit within the remains of a cashel, a roughly circular enclosure of dry-stone walling of the kind commonly built in early medieval Ireland as a farmstead or small defended settlement.

What makes this particular site quietly arresting is how legible it still is despite centuries of collapse and slow absorption into the hillside. The two clochans, as these corbelled or dry-stone circular huts are known in Irish archaeology, do not simply share a yard; they were physically joined, and a communicating passage once ran between them, its location now marked by a gap just seventy-five centimetres wide in the shared stonework.

The two huts were recorded as measuring roughly 6.5 metres by 5.5 metres and 6 metres in internal diameter respectively, substantial enough to suggest genuine habitation rather than casual or seasonal shelter. The first abuts the cashel's south-western wall, and the second is conjoined to its northern side, suggesting the complex grew in stages, one structure added to another as need demanded. Each hut retained its own independent entrance as well, one facing east-south-east and the other south-east, orientations that would have caught the morning light and offered some shelter from the prevailing Atlantic weather. Today the walls have sunk to low, grass-grown, stony banks, the kind that read clearly from a certain angle but can be walked past without recognition. The site was documented as part of the Dingle Peninsula Archaeological Survey published in 1986, the landmark inventory of the Corca Dhuibhne landscape compiled by J. Cuppage.

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