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 clochans, the small dry-stone beehive huts characteristic of early medieval Ireland, particularly common along the Dingle Peninsula.
The site was labelled simply as 'Fort' on the Fair Plan, the detailed working document used in the preparation of the first edition of the Ordnance Survey maps. That first edition recorded it faithfully. At some point between its mapping and the present day, it vanished entirely from the landscape.
The enclosure carries the reference KE052-246 in the archaeological record, and its existence is documented through J. Cuppage's 1986 survey of the Corca Dhuibhne region, a thorough archaeological study of the Dingle Peninsula that catalogued hundreds of sites across this particularly dense concentration of early Irish monuments. The grouping of four clochans within a single circular enclosure would have suggested a small monastic or farming settlement, the kind of modest communal arrangement found elsewhere on the peninsula, where inhabitants would have lived and worked within a defined and bounded space. Whether the enclosure was dismantled for building material, absorbed gradually into agricultural land, or simply eroded away is not recorded. What remains is a map reference, a grid coordinate, and a view of the bay that the people who once lived there would also have known.