They are easy to overlook as rubble or field clearance, but they are something more deliberate: cleits, or turf stands, built to store and dry cut peat. The sheer number of them in one place makes this cluster quietly remarkable.

A cleit is a long, narrow, rectangular stone structure, typically dry-walled and roofed in a technique known as corbelling, where flat stones are laid in overlapping courses that gradually close to form a roof without mortar. The form is most famously associated with St Kilda, the remote Atlantic archipelago off Scotland, where hundreds of cleits were used by islanders to store seabirds, eggs, and fuel. Their presence in County Clare, catalogued in the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996, is less celebrated but no less interesting. On the wide terraces of Murrooghkilly, the structures represent the organised infrastructure of turf harvesting, the careful work of communities who cut peat from the bog and needed somewhere to stack and dry it before bringing it home. The corbelled roofing, even where only partially surviving, allowed airflow while keeping rain off the fuel, a practical solution worked out in stone.