Clochan, Tiduff, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Clochan, Tiduff, Co. Kerry

Three interlocking beehive huts sitting inside a crescent-shaped stone enclosure is an unusual enough arrangement on its own, but what makes this site in Tiduff particularly striking is how the landscape itself was pressed into service as a defensive feature.

The western side of the enclosure required no wall at all; a steep glen provided a natural barrier, leaving the builders to concentrate their effort on a curved stone bank that completes the circuit on the remaining sides.

The structure belongs to a category known as a cahir, an Irish stone ringfort, and this one is described as univallate, meaning it has a single enclosing bank rather than multiple concentric rings. That bank, now softened under a covering of grass, still reads clearly on the ground, rising to about a metre on the interior face and slightly less on the exterior. Inside, the three clocháns, the corbelled dry-stone huts that give the townland its name, are arranged so that they adjoin one another, sharing walls in a tight cluster. The stonework is largely obscured by vegetation and accumulated soil, though dry-stone construction remains visible in the northernmost hut, which also preserves the most legible profile: internally around 18 metres from north to south, roughly 8 metres east to west, and standing between 1 and 3.2 metres in height. A modest opening of about 3.4 metres faces south-east, and a separate gap of 2.6 metres breaks through the enclosing bank. The site was recorded by C. Toal in the North Kerry Archaeological Survey, published in 1995, which remains one of the more systematic efforts to document the dense concentration of early medieval remains across this part of the peninsula.

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