Clochan, Gleann Fán, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Settlement Sites

Clochan, Gleann Fán, Co. Kerry

One of the more quietly disorienting things about Caher Murphy, known in Irish as Cathair Mhurfaí, is the way you move through it.

To reach the sixth of its drystone huts, you cannot simply walk in from the main entrance; you must first pass through the fourth. That kind of deliberate, nested arrangement, built without mortar into the southern slopes of Mount Eagle overlooking Dingle Bay, speaks to a settlement logic that has largely been forgotten.

The site is an oval cashel, a type of early medieval stone enclosure typical of the western seaboard, and its interior is almost entirely taken up by five roughly circular, conjoined clochans, the corbelled stone huts associated with early monastic or secular communities in Ireland, along with a sixth, more irregularly shaped structure. Beneath the cashel wall, a souterrain, an underground passage or chamber used variously for storage, refuge, or ventilation, connects from one of the huts to a hidden chamber below. The sixth hut is 3.3 metres in diameter and its drystone wall survives to a height of 1.75 metres; the paved entrance passage is less than a metre long and less than half a metre wide, with a low sill stone at its inner end. A cupboard recess recorded by the archaeologist Macalister in 1899 is no longer visible. The Office of Public Works carried out considerable restoration here, and during nineteenth-century work an elaborate cross-slab came to light; it is now held by the National Museum of Ireland. A fragment of a rotary quern stone, the upper grinding stone of a hand mill, was also found lying loose within the enclosure, a small domestic detail that places ordinary life alongside whatever ritual or communal purpose the site may once have served.

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