Qualla: Glin North

Glin North: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Elemaki, CC BY 3.0. A stone-paved path leads up to the entrance of one of the beehive huts at Glin North, and someone laid those paving stones long enough ago that no one remembers laying them. The path is the kind of detail that brings a place into focus. It tells you that a real person walked this way, often enough to want firm footing in the wet, and cared enough to gather flat stones and set them properly. The wider site is a National Monument: a clochán, a stone fort and a cashel, all built into the sloping ground south of the Milltown River and west of a small mountain called Scragg. Nearly five kilometres north-northwest of Dingle, far from the road, it is one of those Irish monuments that almost nobody finds and that rewards anyone who does.

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Image: Elemaki | CC BY 3.0

Glin North: Concentric Walls

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Elemaki, CC BY 3.0. Glin North's central feature is a stone fort with two concentric walls, a configuration the archaeologist Peter Harbison singled out for description in his 1970 'Guide to the National and Historic Monuments of Ireland.' Concentric ringforts are not common. The Dingle Peninsula ha...

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Image: Elemaki | CC BY 3.0

Glin North: The Cashel

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Elemaki, CC BY 3.0. The cashel - a stone-walled ringfort - covers 650 square metres internally, which is about the area of two medium-sized house plots in a modern Irish suburb. That is a substantial enclosure. Cashels in the Irish landscape are typically dated between the 5th and 12th centuries AD,...

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Image: Elemaki | CC BY 3.0

Glin North: Harbison's Eye

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Elemaki, CC BY 3.0. Peter Harbison was one of the great cataloguers of Irish monuments. From the late 1960s onward, he travelled the country with a notebook and a camera, recording the surviving fragments of medieval and prehistoric Ireland in a series of guides that remain in print decades later. H...

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Image: Elemaki | CC BY 3.0

Glin North: Off the Tourist Route

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Elemaki, CC BY 3.0. Most visitors to the Dingle Peninsula do not find Glin North. The site is roughly five kilometres from Dingle town, but it sits well off the main road that loops around Slea Head and through Ventry. Reaching it requires turning inland toward the Milltown River valley and walking ...

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Image: Elemaki | CC BY 3.0

Glin North: Under Scragg

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Elemaki, CC BY 3.0. Above the site rises Scragg mountain - a low summit by Kerry standards, but high enough to dominate the immediate horizon. To the north, the Milltown River drains toward Smerwick Harbour. To the south, the Dingle catchment falls toward the town and the bay beyond. The position is...

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Image: Elemaki | CC BY 3.0