Clochan, Gleann Fán, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Settlement Sites

Clochan, Gleann Fán, Co. Kerry

On the southern slopes of Mount Eagle, on a rocky terrace above Gleann Fán, four small stone structures sit in rough pastureland.

Two have largely survived; two have collapsed to their foundations. Collectively they are known as Clochán Scológ, the name referring to a clochaun, a type of early medieval dry-stone hut built using corbelling, a technique in which courses of flat stones are laid so that each projects slightly inward over the one below, eventually meeting at the top without mortar or any other bonding material. The result is a self-supporting beehive shape that has outlasted almost everything built around it.

The southern hut is oval in plan, standing 2.2 metres high with an internal diameter of between 3.7 and 4.1 metres. Its entrance, now blocked, faces east and is reached by a 3.75-metre passageway lined with upright slabs. From there, a lintelled passage connects internally to the northern hut, which is roughly D-shaped and considerably lower, at 1.3 metres in height. A collapsed recess in the south-eastern wall of that northern hut was recorded by the archaeologist R. A. S. Macalister in 1899 as a small chamber measuring approximately 1.45 by 0.45 metres, though it may equally have served as an outward-facing entrance passage. The two remaining structures, reduced now to foundation level, are oriented east to west and are joined to the northern hut on its north side, though they appear never to have communicated with it directly. The larger of the two foundations measures nearly 3.9 by 5.25 metres, with an entrance on its western side.

The group as a whole was documented by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey, and the arrangement of the four structures, the internal connections between two of them and the apparent independence of the other two, raises questions that have not been fully resolved. Whether the complex functioned as a single dwelling, a small monastic grouping, or something more utilitarian is not established. What is clear is the care taken in its construction, and the degree to which two of these structures, after more than a millennium on a windswept Kerry hillside, have held their shape.

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