Clochan, Gleann Fán, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Settlement Sites

Clochan, Gleann Fán, Co. Kerry

In the valley of Gleann Fán on the Dingle Peninsula, a ruined clochaun sits in the landscape, quietly outlasting most of the reasons anyone might have built it.

A clochaun is a dry-stone beehive hut, corbelled together without mortar, a building technique used in Ireland from the early medieval period onwards and associated particularly with monastic and agricultural life along the western seaboard. This one, catalogued as Curran no. 5, is in a ruined state, which places it among the many such structures on the peninsula that have slowly yielded to weather and neglect over the centuries.

The Dingle Peninsula holds one of the highest concentrations of early medieval field monuments in Europe, and the clochauns of the area have been studied and catalogued as part of wider efforts to document that inheritance. This particular structure appears in J. Cuppage's archaeological survey of the Corca Dhuibhne region, published in 1986, a detailed inventory that drew together decades of fieldwork across the peninsula. The designation Curran no. 5 suggests it belongs to a cluster of similar structures in the immediate area, several beehive huts in proximity to one another, which was a common arrangement when such buildings served a small farming settlement or a group of monks living in loose community.

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