Souterrain, Ballynakilly, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Settlement Sites

Souterrain, Ballynakilly, Co. Kerry

Tucked into the north-eastern corner of a stone fort on the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, there is a doorway that barely qualifies as one.

It measures just fifty-five centimetres wide and twenty centimetres tall, framed by a flat lintel stone, and it leads nowhere that can currently be followed. The passage beyond is blocked, aligned north to south, and has been that way for some time. What makes it worth noting is what it once was: the entrance to a souterrain, an underground passage or chamber of the kind constructed throughout early medieval Ireland, typically used for storage, refuge, or both.

The opening sits within a caher, the Irish term for a stone-built ringfort, a type of enclosed settlement that was common across Kerry and the wider south-west during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries. Souterrains were a fairly standard feature of such settlements, though their precise functions are still debated by archaeologists. This particular example was documented as part of a comprehensive survey of the Iveragh Peninsula by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan, published by Cork University Press in 1996, which catalogued the remarkable density of early medieval and prehistoric monuments across south Kerry. The lintelled opening here survives intact, even if the passage it once served has long since been filled or collapsed behind it.

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Pete F
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