Enclosure, Baile An Chnocáin, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Enclosures

Enclosure, Baile An Chnocáin, Co. Kerry

On the western flank of Brandon Mountain in County Kerry, a small cluster of stone structures sits on open mountain terrain, modest in scale but quietly complex in arrangement.

The site, known in Irish as Clochán na gCaorach, meaning roughly "the stone hut of the sheep", consists of not one enclosure but two, each attached to a central hut and each furnished with its own small subsidiary chamber. The whole ensemble is compact enough to miss if you did not know to look, yet the deliberateness of its layout suggests it was built with specific and repeated uses in mind.

The arrangement works like this: a rectangular enclosure measuring 5.5 by 4 metres abuts the hut on its eastern side, and tucked against the north-eastern corner of that enclosure is a small rectangular chamber just 1.5 metres square. On the other side, a second enclosure of roughly 3.5 metres square presses against the north-western face of the hut, with a D-shaped chamber, 2 by 1.3 metres, built into its north-western wall. A clochán, in general terms, is a dry-stone corbelled hut of the kind associated with early monastic and pastoral use in the west of Ireland, and the positioning of these enclosures and chambers around a central structure of that type points to a working site of some kind, perhaps connected with seasonal herding on the mountain. The site sits a little below and to the north of Loughs Eightragh and Oughteragh. It was documented by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey, a thorough catalogue of the extraordinary density of early remains across the Corca Dhuibhne region.

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