Qualla: Fahan, County Kerry

Fahan, County Kerry: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Adrian Platt, CC BY-SA 2.0. Four hundred and sixty stone structures sit on the slopes of Mount Eagle, of which four hundred and fourteen are beehive huts. That is not a misprint. Walk a single hillside above the road between Ventry and Slea Head and you can trip over millennia. Dunbeg Fort clings to a promontory whose cliffs are slowly chewed away by the Atlantic. Drystone clocháns - their roofs corbelled inward in tightening rings - cluster on the hillsides. A Famine-era cottage, restored and furnished, sits a stone's throw from a fort built before Christ. The whole of Irish history is folded into a four-mile drive, layer upon layer, and the layers do not bother to keep themselves separate.

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Image: Adrian Platt | CC BY-SA 2.0

Fahan, County Kerry: Dunbeg, Slipping into the Sea

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Barbara Walsh from Ireland, CC BY 2.0. Dunbeg Fort is built on a triangular promontory that pokes out into Dingle Bay like the prow of a ship. The Atlantic has been chewing on that prow for centuries. The cliffs have eroded since the fort was built, and a substantial portion of the structure has already gone over the ...

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Image: Barbara Walsh from Ireland | CC BY 2.0

Fahan, County Kerry: Cities of Beehives

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ingo Mehling, CC BY-SA 3.0. The collection of clocháns at Fahan is said to be the most remarkable in Ireland. A clochán is a drystone hut, round or sometimes D-shaped, built by laying flat stones in tightening rings until the roof closes itself into a corbelled dome - a beehive shape without a single piece ...

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Image: Ingo Mehling | CC BY-SA 3.0

Fahan, County Kerry: Du Noyer's Sketches

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cargoking, CC BY 3.0. George Victor Du Noyer visited Fahan in 1858 and drew what he saw - careful pen-and-ink sketches that are still useful to archaeologists today. Du Noyer was a geologist for the Geological Survey of Ireland and an obsessive landscape artist, and his Fahan drawings caught the settl...

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Image: Cargoking | CC BY 3.0

Fahan, County Kerry: The Kavanaugh Cottage

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 2.0. The Kavanaugh Famine Cottage sits on the north side of the R559, just west of the Dunbeg car park. In its original form it had two rooms and a loft, the standard layout for a small tenant family in the early 19th century. Restored as a museum, it now has three rooms and two outho...

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Image: CC BY-SA 2.0

Fahan, County Kerry: Walking Through Time

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Oliver Dixon, CC BY-SA 2.0. What makes Fahan extraordinary is the indifference of its landscape to its own age. You round a bend on the R559 and find yourself looking at a hut wall built before the Romans reached Britain. You park beside a Famine cottage and walk to a promontory fort that might predate writ...

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Image: Oliver Dixon | CC BY-SA 2.0