Clochan, Sceilg Mhichíl, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Clochan, Sceilg Mhichíl, Co. Kerry

One of the smaller beehive huts on Skellig Michael carries an odd detail at its crown: a stone slab pierced by a circular hole, placed there sometime around 1891 after the original domed roof collapsed.

A clochán, to use the Irish term, is a corbelled dry-stone cell, built without mortar by layering stones inward and upward until they meet at a point, forming a watertight dome through geometry alone. Most visitors moving through the monastery terrace focus on the larger, more complete examples, but this one, recorded as Cell F, rewards a closer look precisely because its history of partial ruin and repair is still legible in the stonework.

Cell F sits near the eastern end of the main terrace, just north of the Monks' Graveyard, which is a leacht-type structure, meaning a low, flat-topped cairn associated with early Christian commemoration of the dead. The cell itself is modest in scale: roughly 2.5 metres square at floor level, with a doorway only 1.2 metres high that tapers slightly as it rises, narrowing from 0.62 metres at the base to 0.45 metres under the lintel. Inside, three wall-niches are set at varying heights, and two rows of stones project inward from the walls, possibly serving as pegs or supports. Two low slabs placed at right angles to one another near the centre of the flagged floor may be the remains of a hearth. The roof, which rises to 3.8 metres, apparently gave way sometime between around 1870 and 1891, after which it was rebuilt and sealed with the perforated capstone still visible today, as noted by the art historian Françoise Henry in her 1957 study of the site. The function of the perforation is not recorded, though it sits at the apex of a structure that once sheltered early medieval monks living one of the most austere religious lives in Atlantic Europe.

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