Clochan, Glenderry, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
Within the enclosure of a cashel near Glenderry in County Kerry, a series of shallow depressions in the ground hint at something that was once quite substantial.
One of five such features identified inside the stone fort, this possible clochan, or beehive hut, survives today as little more than a rounded hollow, its original form suggested by the drystone walling that still defines its edges.
A cashel is a stone-walled ringfort, a type of enclosed settlement common across early medieval Ireland, typically associated with farming families of some local standing. Inside this particular example, the five depressions are all sub-circular in plan, ranging in diameter from roughly 4.8 metres to 8 metres. If they are indeed the remains of clochans, those corbelled stone cells whose corbelled roofs were built without mortar, each course of stone slightly overlapping the one below until the structure closed at the top, then the interior of this cashel once held a small cluster of domestic or agricultural buildings. The variation in size between the five features may reflect different functions, though the archaeology does not allow for certainty on that point. The identification of these features as clochans remains tentative; they are described as suggesting beehive huts rather than confirming them, and the distinction matters in a landscape where natural subsidence and agricultural disturbance can produce similar surface traces.