Souterrain, Meall Na Mbreac, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Souterrain, Meall Na Mbreac, Co. Kerry

At Meall Na Mbreac in County Kerry, badgers have been doing the work of archaeologists.

The site is riddled with their burrows, and in the process of that digging and tunnelling, a large lintel-like slab has been exposed in the north-western wall of an enclosure. That slab may mark the entrance to a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber built during the early medieval period, typically used for storage or as a place of refuge. The conditional phrasing matters here: the exposure is tantalising but not conclusive, and the site sits in a category of places where the ground is suggesting something without yet confirming it.

The enclosure itself retains what appears to be its original entrance, a gap of approximately 1.4 metres wide in the western wall. That kind of deliberate opening, preserved across many centuries, gives a sense of how the space was once oriented and approached. The site was documented by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan in their archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula, published by Cork University Press in 1996, a systematic effort to record the dense and varied archaeology of South Kerry before it was further obscured or disturbed. Whether the souterrain, if that is indeed what lies beneath, was part of a domestic settlement or served some other function remains an open question.

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