Yet Cloghermore Cave yielded exactly that, alongside something older and stranger: the remains of an earlier, non-Christian community who had been using the same underground space centuries before any Norseman arrived on the Kerry coast.

The cave was excavated over two seasons between 1999 and 2000, and the finds were considerable. Archaeologists recovered large quantities of disarticulated human and animal bone, cremated animal bone, more than 300 artefacts, and a single articulated burial, meaning one person laid out intact, the rest of the human remains scattered or disturbed. Nineteen radiocarbon dates helped piece together a two-phase sequence of use. The first phase belongs to the 8th century and is associated with a small local population whose burial customs appear to predate Christian influence in the area. The second phase, dating to the late 9th century, involved the deliberate placement of six burials of Scandinavian character into the cave. The practice of using caves as burial sites is unusual in the Irish context for any period, which makes the layering of two distinct communities within the same space all the more striking. Viking-age burials in Ireland tend to cluster around coastal settlements and trading centres, and their presence this far into Kerry, tucked inside a cave, points to a community operating at some distance from the better-documented Norse towns of the east coast. The research underpinning much of the interpretation of this site was carried out by Michael Connolly as part of a doctoral thesis examining the prehistoric and early medieval settlement of the Lee Valley around Tralee.