Qualla: Glanfahan https://qualla.com/glanfahan en-us © 2026 Bendyline Wed, 08 Jul 2026 02:40:11 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/2/8/glanfahan-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Glanfahan https://qualla.com/glanfahan Glanfahan: Introduction https://qualla.com/glanfahan/ Photo credit M J Richardson, CC BY-SA 2.0. Four hundred and seventeen drystone structures. Nineteen underground passages. Eighteen standing stones. All inside a single townland on the southern slopes of Mount Eagle, looking out over Dingle Bay three kilometres south of Dunquin. Glanfahan is what an abandoned medieval village looks like when nobody comes back to remove the materials. The corbelled beehive huts still stand, some leaning, some half-collapsed, clustered into walled enclosures called cashels. Inside one of them, archaeologists in 2011 found a wrasse tooth - the small grinding tooth of a coastal fish, drilled and polished as an amulet. Someone wore it for luck, then lost it. Most of the rest of the people who lived here have lost themselves too.

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Image: M J Richardson | CC BY-SA 2.0

]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/2/8/glanfahan-wp/gc28-glanfahan-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Glanfahan: An Impossible Census https://qualla.com/glanfahan/ Photo credit M J Richardson, CC BY-SA 2.0. Counting stone structures in a place like Glanfahan is harder than it sounds. Drystone walls collapse and merge with hillsides. A pile of stones that was once a small clochán becomes indistinguishable from a natural cairn within a few centuries of neglect. Surveyors using aerial ...

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]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/2/8/glanfahan-wp/gc28-glanfahan-an-impossible-census.mp3 0:06 2 full Glanfahan: Dating by Eye https://qualla.com/glanfahan/ Photo credit M J Richardson, CC BY-SA 2.0. Putting a date on Glanfahan is genuinely hard. The drystone technique used to build the huts has been employed in Ireland from the Neolithic until the twentieth century. Some scholars place the main occupation in the early Christian period, between the 5th and 8th centuries AD, t...

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]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/2/8/glanfahan-wp/gc28-glanfahan-dating-by-eye.mp3 0:06 3 full Glanfahan: Cashels and Clocháns https://qualla.com/glanfahan/ Photo credit M J Richardson, CC BY-SA 2.0. A cashel is a stone-walled enclosure - in effect a ring fort built of stone rather than earth - typically around 20 to 25 metres in diameter. Inside it, smaller drystone huts called clocháns provide the actual living quarters. Glanfahan has several named cashel groups. Caherconne...

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]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/2/8/glanfahan-wp/gc28-glanfahan-cashels-and-cloch-ns.mp3 0:06 4 full Glanfahan: What the Dirt Held https://qualla.com/glanfahan/ Photo credit M J Richardson, CC BY-SA 2.0. Excavations in 2011 and 2012 under one of the huts called Clochaun 3 turned up the small intimate residue of daily life. There was a sharpening stone for working metal or wood. There was a hammerstone for breaking bones to extract marrow. There were pieces of flint and quartz, fl...

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]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/2/8/glanfahan-wp/gc28-glanfahan-what-the-dirt-held.mp3 0:06 5 full Glanfahan: Damaged in Living Memory https://qualla.com/glanfahan/ Photo credit M J Richardson, CC BY-SA 2.0. Glanfahan is also a story of slow loss. Many of the archaeological sites here were damaged in the 20th century by what farmers and surveyors politely call agricultural improvements - the clearing of stones, the levelling of mounds, the bulldozing of clochán remains to create flat...

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]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/2/8/glanfahan-wp/gc28-glanfahan-damaged-in-living-memory.mp3 0:06 6 full Glanfahan: The View Out https://qualla.com/glanfahan/ Photo credit M J Richardson, CC BY-SA 2.0. Walk up through the cashels of Glanfahan on a clear afternoon and the Atlantic opens beneath you. Dingle Bay glitters or growls depending on the wind. To the west, the Blasket Islands rise from the sea in dark humps - inhabited in living memory, abandoned in 1953, now silent. Ske...

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]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/2/8/glanfahan-wp/gc28-glanfahan-the-view-out.mp3 0:06 7 full