View From Inside a Beehive Hut, Dingle

Beehive huts can be found in various parts of Ireland, especially in Dingle.    Resembling….wait for it….beehives! in shape, and oft times clustered together in groupings.  www.celticquill.com has a great article on these amazing structures:  “Clocháns are dry-stone buildings dating from c.2000 BC. They are usually round in shape, but rectangular huts are known as well. What gives these huts their distinctive appearance is a building technique known as corbelling, i.e. the layering of stones, with each layer bending slightly closer and narrower towards the peak. Stones were laid with an outward and downward tilt to shed water, making these huts watertight.”

Photo courtesy of http://www.celticquill.com

People lived in them, such as visitors or monks, and later on, they were used for farm animals or storage.  When we visited some in Dingle, we were amazed by two things:  how low the door entrances were (my husband whacked his poor head on one), and how amazingly perfect and dry and intact they still were after all these hundreds of years.  Talk about well-built to stand the test of time.  To quote many a time-traveled elder:  “They don’t make ’em like they used to.”   🙂  Slainte, Lisa