Hut site, Baile Na Bhfionnúrach, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On the lower slopes of the Brandon Mountain range in County Kerry, there is a corbelled stone structure that was once half of something larger.
Early Ordnance Survey maps recorded two conjoined clocháns here, the plural of clochán, a dry-stone beehive hut built without mortar using a technique called corbelling, where each course of stone is laid slightly inward until the courses meet at the top. At some point between those early surveys and the present, one of the pair disappeared entirely. What remains is a single oval structure, its walls between one and one point six five metres thick, rising to two point two metres in height and measuring roughly five point eight by four point one metres across.
The surviving clochán retains a lintelled doorway facing south-south-west, with two further openings at the west and north that appear to have been blocked. Either of those blocked doorways may once have connected directly into the second, now-vanished structure. That detail, the presence of deliberate internal communication between two conjoined cells, suggests something more considered than a simple shepherd's shelter, though the precise function and date of the site remain unrecorded. The site was documented in Judith Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Corca Dhuibhne region, a thorough sweep of the Dingle Peninsula that catalogued many such structures across one of the most monument-dense landscapes in Ireland.
The Brandon Mountain range is already well traversed by those following the old pilgrimage route to the summit associated with Saint Brendan, and the clochán sits within that broader tradition of early Christian and pre-Christian stone-building along these Atlantic slopes. The blocked doorways and the ghost of the missing second cell give the structure a slightly unresolved quality, as though the record preserves a shape that the ground no longer fully confirms.