Souterrain, Cinn Aird Thiar, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On a north-west facing slope above the Trabeg inlet on the Dingle Peninsula, a circular earthwork encloses something that has puzzled those who have looked closely at it.
Within the interior of this univallate rath, a single-ditched ringfort of the kind built across Ireland from the early medieval period onwards, the southern portion is taken up by an oval feature that does not quite fit the usual pattern. Bounded on its north side by a low bank roughly three-quarters of a metre high, and on its south side by an equivalent drop from the general floor level of the enclosure, it measures approximately 21.5 metres east to west and 8 metres north to south. The geometry is deliberate; someone shaped this space carefully.
The detail that anchors the oddness is a stone-lined hole at the southern end of this oval feature. It is likely the entrance or remnant of a souterrain, an underground stone-built passage or chamber used in early medieval Ireland for storage, refuge, or both, constructed beneath or alongside a rath and accessed from within its interior. A further clue sits in plain sight on the outer face of the bank, to the west of the enclosure's entrance: a large slab of stone set into the earthwork itself. Both features were noted in the Ordnance Survey Name Books for the townland of Kinard, which places awareness of them in the nineteenth century at the latest. The site was documented in detail by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, a landmark regional survey that catalogued the extraordinary concentration of early monuments across this part of County Kerry. The rath overlooks the mouth of the Trabeg inlet, a position that would have commanded clear views of coastal approaches, which was not an incidental consideration for whoever chose to build here.