Qualla: Cloghane

Cloghane: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

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Cloghane: An Clochan

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 D...

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Cloghane: The Mountain's Shadow

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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. T...

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Cloghane: The Anthropologist's Lens

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

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Cloghane: Twinned with Brittany

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

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Cloghane: The Wild Atlantic Way

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 pe...

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