Clachans

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Clachans

The house cluster, consisting of irregular groupings of farmhouses often in association with an unenclosed and communally worked field system, was found extensively in the western regions of Ireland in the nineteenth century. This settlement form contrasted with the dispersed single farmstead, which is most characteristic of the Irish landscape in modern times. The geographer Estyn Evans christened these clusters clachans (a term with no known provenance in Irish linguistic tradition) on the basis of a similarity with a Scottish settlement of this name. The associated field system, referred to as rundale, was characterized by intermixed holdings that were frequently redistributed among different owners. In 1939 Evans suggested that such small house-clusters in Donegal represented a continuity of settlement type with early medieval antecedents, which coexisted with the raths or ringforts, the contemporary equivalent of the single dispersed farmstead.

Many historians and geographers searched for this elusive settlement cluster, but little convincing evidence has been found for any longstanding dichotomy. Most of these western clusters in fact originated quite late in the eighteenth-century agricultural and population boom, and represented cultural, economic, and ecological responses to marginal environments and material poverty—situations in which survival depended on cooperative farming systems. The earlier discourse on clachans attempted to demonstrate long continuities in patterns of settlement in the Irish landscape. The idea of the clachan is largely a construction of a particular school of thought about the history of the Irish landscape. Classical models of settlement and related patterns present in civilizations in the core of Europe were applied to Ireland to produce a stereotyped archaic Celtic civilization on the Atlantic fringes of Europe. German scholars, especially in late nineteenth century, were interested in morphological and genetic classifications of rural settlements. Much of the work of historical geographers in the 1950s and 1960s followed this approach. Much of the theorizing on clachans and settlement studies is based on dubious scholarship and defective readings of Irish and early medieval sources.