Souterrain, Baile Uí Bhuinn, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Settlement Sites

Souterrain, Baile Uí Bhuinn, Co. Kerry

On the western shore of Brandon Bay in County Kerry, a drainage operation quietly erased one ancient feature and may have opened a door to another.

The well known locally as Tobernasool, Tobar na Súl, or Tobar an Leasa sat roughly three hundred metres from the shoreline until workers digging a drain destroyed it. In the course of that same excavation, labourers broke into what they described as a cave, though it was never fully explored. The working assumption is that what they found was a souterrain, an underground passage or chamber typically built during the early medieval period in Ireland, often used for storage, refuge, or concealment, and usually associated with nearby settlement.

The second name attached to the well, Tobar an Leasa, carries its own quiet weight. "Leas" in Irish place-names generally refers to a ringfort, the circular earthwork enclosure that served as a farmstead and dwelling during the early medieval centuries. The name suggests that a ringfort once occupied this ground, and that the well, the possible souterrain, and the enclosure may together have formed part of a single settlement complex, now largely gone or buried. J. Cuppage documented this cluster of features in the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, drawing on local information about the cave discovery alongside the physical and toponymic evidence that remained.

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