Clochan, Fán, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Settlement Sites

Clochan, Fán, Co. Kerry

On a south-facing slope above Dingle Bay, two ancient stone huts survive in a state that rewards close attention precisely because they are so easy to miss.

The walls have long since collapsed to low, grass-grown stony banks, and the structures sit within a cashel, a roughly circular enclosure of dry-stone walling that would once have defined a farmstead or small defended settlement. What makes this particular group quietly interesting is the relationship between the two huts, known as clochans, the corbelled or dry-stone circular buildings associated with early medieval Irish settlement and monastic life. They were not simply built side by side; they were deliberately connected.

The larger of the two huts measures approximately 6.5 metres by 5.5 metres internally, and it sits abutting the cashel wall at the south-west. The second, around 6 metres in internal diameter, is conjoined to the north side of the first. Each had its own independent entrance, one facing east-south-east and the other south-east, suggesting their occupants could come and go without passing through a shared space. Yet between them a communicating passage once existed, now marked only by a gap of about 75 centimetres in the shared wall. That small opening, barely wide enough to turn sideways through, is one of the more evocative details here; the physical trace of a relationship between two spaces, and presumably two lives or functions, that we can no longer fully reconstruct. The site was documented by J. Cuppage in the 1986 archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, Corca Dhuibhne.

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