Enclosure, Tiduff, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Enclosures
On the North Kerry landscape, a site that once appeared on an Ordnance Survey map as a tidy sub-rectangular enclosure has quietly become something harder to categorise.
By the time a later surveyor passed through, a fieldbank had sliced across its southern side, and somebody had thought it worth marking the word "Cave" on the 1916 edition. What survives today is a semi-circular enclosure sheltering two possible beehive chambers, the southern opening now filled in, the original geometry obscured by centuries of agricultural pragmatism.
Beehive chambers, known in Irish as clochán, are a dry-stone building technique associated with early medieval monastic and secular settlement, particularly common across the Dingle Peninsula and the broader Kerry landscape. They are corbelled structures, the walls built inward course by course until they meet at the top without mortar. The two chambers at Tiduff are substantial. The western one measures roughly eleven metres east to west, with a stone bank still standing around 0.8 metres high. The eastern chamber is larger at approximately fifteen metres east to west, its western wall touching the eastern wall of its neighbour, the enclosing bank slightly lower at 0.6 metres. The fact that the 1840 to 1841 Ordnance Survey recorded the site as sub-rectangular, while the present remains are semi-circular, suggests either that significant structural change occurred in the intervening decades or that earlier surveyors were working with incomplete visibility of what was already a partly ruined complex. The "Cave" notation of 1916 adds another layer of ambiguity; it may reflect a local name, a perceived underground element, or simply a surveyor's best guess at something that no longer read clearly as architecture.