Cloghan, Cill Éinne, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Settlement Sites

Cloghan, Cill Éinne, Co. Galway

On the wind-scoured limestone of Inis Mór, the largest of the Aran Islands, a small early Christian oratory called Teampall Bheanáin sits near the highest point of the island, reputed to be one of the smallest churches in the world.

Clustered around it, at distances of just a few metres to over a hundred, are several clochans, the beehive-shaped or roughly corbelled dry-stone cells that early Irish monks used as shelters or places of retreat. What makes this particular grouping worth pausing over is the variety packed into a very small area, and the way excavation has quietly complicated the story that the stones appear to tell.

The three structures near Teampall Bheanáin each have their own character. The nearest, just five metres to the north-north-east, is a rectangular cell roughly three metres long and one and a half metres wide, partly formed from the natural rock face rather than built entirely by hand, the living bedrock pressed into service as two of its walls. About fifty metres to the north-north-west stands a more substantial dry-stone building, roughly square at around 2.9 metres per side, with a doorway facing east and a window to the north. Excavations carried out in 1985 by Manning showed that this was not a single construction but was built in three distinct phases: the original square cell was extended with an annexe measuring 2.7 by 2.2 metres, and both elements were later enclosed within an outer sheltering wall. The dig also produced seventeenth-century pottery, a reminder that these ancient-looking structures were still being used, adapted, or at least visited well into the early modern period. A third feature, around 125 metres to the north-west, is now a cairn of collapsed stone, twelve metres long and nearly seven metres wide, with traces of inner wall facing still visible beneath the rubble. The Ordnance Survey Letters, compiled by O'Flanagan and published in 1927, record it specifically as a clochan, suggesting that local knowledge of its original form survived even as the structure itself had long since fallen.

The site sits in an area of Cill Éinne, the eastern parish of Inis Mór, where early monastic remains are unusually dense even by the standards of the Aran Islands. The grouping around Teampall Bheanáin rewards slow walking and close attention; the cells are small enough to be easy to overlook, particularly the partly natural one, which blends into the karst landscape almost entirely.

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