Souterrain, Baile An Ásaigh, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
Beneath the rough marshy ground at the head of a narrow valley northeast of Dingle town, a passage runs into the earth and goes nowhere, at least as far as anyone has been able to determine.
The site is a souterrain, an underground stone-lined tunnel or chamber built in early medieval Ireland, typically used for cold storage, refuge, or both. What makes this particular example quietly strange is precisely what it withholds: a large stone at the western end of a shallow hollow is almost certainly a roofing slab, and beneath it an opening hints at a passage running further west, but the passage is filled in and has never been inspected.
The hollow itself measures roughly three metres from east to west and between thirty and fifty-five centimetres deep, which gives some sense of how close to the surface the structure sits. The surrounding landscape, marshy and rough, has done its work in obscuring whatever else may lie here. The site was recorded by J. Cuppage as part of the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, a thorough regional study that catalogued the extraordinary density of prehistoric and early historic monuments along this stretch of the Kerry coast. That survey noted the souterrain as inaccessible, and that designation has not changed.
There is not much for a visitor to see in any conventional sense. The hollow and its probable roofing slab sit in waterlogged ground, and the passage beneath remains sealed and unstudied. Its interest lies less in what can be seen than in what the landscape keeps to itself, a filled tunnel beneath a wet field at the edge of a valley, with the question of where it goes left entirely open.