Souterrain, Clochán Na Nuagh, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Souterrain, Clochán Na Nuagh, Co. Kerry

At Clochán Na Nuagh in County Kerry, a shallow but precisely shaped depression in the ground marks what may be the ghost of an ancient underground chamber.

The feature is L-shaped, roughly two metres wide and less than a metre deep, tracing a path of five metres from north-north-west to south-south-east before turning sharply to the north-east for nearly another five metres. That right-angle turn is the telling detail. Subsidence and time rarely produce such geometry by accident.

The depression is thought to indicate a dug-out souterrain, the term for a man-made underground passage or chamber, typically cut into soft earth or constructed from stone, that was used in early medieval Ireland for storage or as a place of refuge. Where built examples survive elsewhere, they often appear in association with ringforts or early ecclesiastical sites. Here, the evidence is subtler: the original structure, if that is what it was, has collapsed or silted over, leaving only its outline pressed into the landscape of the Iveragh Peninsula. The site was recorded and measured as part of a wider archaeological survey of South Kerry compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan and published by Cork University Press in 1996, which catalogued the remarkable density of early historic and prehistoric remains across this part of the county.

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