Clochan, Fán, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the lower southern slopes of Mount Eagle, overlooking Dingle Bay, there once stood a circular enclosure containing four clocháns, the small dry-stone beehive huts associated with early medieval monastic and pastoral life along the western seaboard.
The site was recorded on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey map and labelled simply as 'Fort' on the Fair Plan, the working document used by OS surveyors to compile their findings. That label hints at how the site was understood at the time, as a defended or ceremonial enclosure rather than a purely domestic one. Today, however, neither the enclosure nor the clocháns survive.
The record of this vanished complex comes from J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, 'Corca Dhuibhne', a systematic catalogue of the extraordinary concentration of prehistoric and early Christian monuments found across this stretch of west Kerry. By the time that survey was compiled, the site had already disappeared from the landscape entirely, its stones likely robbed out for field walls or farm buildings over the intervening century. What the first-edition OS map preserved, then, is not just a record of the site but the only evidence that it existed at all. The four clocháns marked within the enclosure suggest a small community or hermitage of some kind, positioned to catch whatever shelter the mountain offered while remaining close to the coast.