Caves, An Bhinn Bhán, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
Inside a stone enclosure on the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, two narrow underground passages meet at right angles, their entrances now visible only because their roofing stones have fallen in.
These are souterrains, a type of man-made underground structure associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, typically thought to have served as places of refuge, storage, or both. What makes this particular pair quietly puzzling is that no one is entirely certain whether they were originally connected. An accumulation of fill between them leaves the question open.
Both passages sit at the centre of a caher, a drystone ringfort of the kind found throughout Kerry and the wider west of Ireland. The first passage runs roughly north-northeast to south-southwest and measures 3.18 metres long, 0.7 metres wide, and 0.7 metres high, its walls built of roughly coursed drystone that has partially collapsed at the northern end. It is at that same northern end where the second passage begins, extending northwest to southeast for 3.75 metres, slightly wider and a little lower than the first, and now partly filled with collapsed stone. The dimensions alone tell you something: these were not spaces in which anyone stood upright. Whoever used them moved through on hands and knees, perhaps pulling a door or stone slab behind them. The archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan, published by Cork University Press in 1996, provides the record from which the structural details are drawn.