Bee Hive Huts

This site is called Caher Conor and is famous for its "beehive huts." Ringforts of this sort are dotted all over Ireland. According to the info sheet we were given at the site: "The majority of these were enclosed farmsteads of the free farmers of the Early Christian Period, the banks and fosses acting as a fence to prevent livestock from straying and to protect against cattle raiders and wild animals. The small size of the sites suggests they were occupied by a single family, the houses, farm buildings and storage places occurring within the enclosed space. They would have been inhabited from ancient times to 1200 AD."


Ancient times to 1200 AD is a long, long time. It's amazing to think of my early human ancestors painstakingly constructing this simple homestead.

More from the handout: "These huts were often found attached to each other with a doorway leading from one to the other. These houses were generally made out of stone because stone was plentiful. They were generally round like a beehive and a special type of craftsmanship is apparent in the building. They were erected in the form of a circle of successive strata of stone, each stratum lying a little closer to the centre than the one beneath and so on upwards until only a small aperture is left at the top which can be closed with a single small flagstone or capstone. No mortar was used in building. The stones have a downward and outward tilt so as to shed the water. This method if building is called corbelling."

I am now obsessed with corbelling. Every time we passed a field littered with exactly this type of rock, which was every 20 minutes or so, I would start espousing my desire to try my hand at building a beehive hut. At some point in my life, I will live in a place with a lot of rocks and I will make this my personal project. If people in ancient times could do it, so can I.

In the interests of architectural research, of course, I lowered myself down into a strange little hallway that appears to go nowhere. I suppose it was used for storage of some sort. In it, I discovered this curious little tunnel that leads into a low, small opening in the main hut. The tunnel is probably 2 or 3 metres long, curved, and too small for any adult human to crawl through it. Any archaeologists out there with a theory to explain this are invited to post comments on the subject.