In 1974, the American anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes lived in a small Kerry village she gave the pseudonym Ballybran. She watched, listened, took notes. Her book - Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland - was published in 1977 and became one of the most contested ethnographies of its decade. It argued that something in the social fabric of west Kerry, in the late-marrying men and the celibate priesthood and the constant rain, was making people mentally ill at extraordinary rates. The villagers recognised themselves. They were furious. Years later they finally identified the place she had studied: An Clochan, Cloghane, a tiny village under Mount Brandon. The book is still in print. The argument is still unresolved. And Cloghane is still here, going about its business under the mountain.
The Irish name Cloghane comes from clochan - a beehive-shaped dry-stone hut of the kind early Christian monks built across this peninsula. The village is small: a population of 297 in the 2011 census, a few terraces of cottages, a church, a pub. It sits on the north side of the Dingle Peninsula, at the foot of Mount Brandon and overlooking Brandon Bay. In 1974 - the same year Scheper-Hughes arrived - the Irish government added Cloghane to the Corca Dhuibhne Gaeltacht, formally recognising it as an Irish-speaking community. The two events were unrelated, but they bracket a moment. The village was simultaneously being celebrated by the state and dissected by the anthropologist. Both kinds of attention left their marks.
Mount Brandon, the second-highest peak in Ireland at 952 metres, looms directly above the village. The eastern face of the mountain - the cliffs and corries above Cloghane - is the dramatic side, the side that catches winter snow and breeds the storms that batter the bay below. The pilgrim path to the summit climbs from this side, following ancient stations of the cross along the Faha Ridge route. On the last Sunday of July, walkers gather at the foot of the mountain and climb to the summit cross. The festival is part Christian saint's day and part pre-Christian harvest celebration, and it has continued, in one form or another, for so long that the layers cannot be cleanly separated.
Scheper-Hughes's argument, simplified: that the disappearance of traditional farming in west Kerry had left a generation of unmarried men, the youngest sons of families that had lost their economic logic, and that these men - alone, drinking, isolated - were filling Irish mental hospitals at startling rates. She blamed the celibacy of the priesthood, the sexual repression of Catholic culture, the brutal climate, the depopulation of the countryside. Her book was praised in academic journals and excoriated in Ireland. Two decades later, in a 2000 essay titled Ire in Ireland, she returned to the village to apologise for the methodological breaches - she had identified the place to identifiable individuals - while standing by most of her conclusions. The villagers, by then, had moved on. The book had become part of the village's history, like the railway or the famine, something that had happened to it and would now always be part of what it was.
Cloghane and the neighbouring village of Brandon - An Clochan agus Ce Bhreanainn - are jointly twinned with the village of Plozevet in Brittany, a Breton-speaking community on the French Atlantic coast. The pairing reflects a Celtic kinship that runs deeper than tourism. Plozevet too has its anthropologists - it was the site of a major French ethnographic study in the 1960s, called the Plozevet research, which examined the modernisation of a traditional rural community. The two villages share a strange distinction: both have been written about extensively by visiting social scientists, both have lived with the consequences, both have continued to be themselves regardless.
Cloghane sits on the Wild Atlantic Way, the tourist route that traces Ireland's west coast for two and a half thousand kilometres. The village is one of the quieter stops on the route - not a destination so much as a passage between Castlegregory and the western reaches of the peninsula. Walkers stop for the mountain. Birdwatchers stop for the bay. According to Samuel Lewis's Topographical Dictionary of Ireland, the village had a population of around 222 in 1837 - which means it has grown only slightly, in nearly two centuries, while the country around it has been transformed many times over. The continuity is striking. The place has not been preserved; it has simply persisted.
Located at 52.23 degrees N, 10.18 degrees W at the foot of Mount Brandon on the northern coast of the Dingle Peninsula. Recommended viewing altitude 3,000 to 6,000 feet AGL to take in the dramatic eastern face of Mount Brandon (952 metres, often cloud-capped) and Brandon Bay opening west to the Atlantic. Nearest airport is Kerry (EIKY), about fifty kilometres east near Farranfore. The mountain's eastern corries hold snow into spring and generate severe orographic weather - expect turbulence and rapidly forming cloud in westerly flow.