Souterrain, Boolacullane, Co. Kerry

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Souterrain, Boolacullane, Co. Kerry

Beneath a field in Boolacullane, County Kerry, there is a passage so narrow that anyone wishing to move through it must get down on hands and knees.

The creepway in question measures roughly sixty centimetres high and thirty centimetres wide, its walls and roof formed from single flat stones, and it connects a corbelled underground chamber to a longer earth-cut passage beyond. This kind of structure is known as a souterrain, an underground gallery or series of chambers built during the early medieval period, typically used for storage or as a place of refuge. What makes this one quietly compelling is the way it came back to light: a ploughman working the field in the 1970s struck a roofing slab and inadvertently reopened an entrance that had been sealed for centuries.

The souterrain sits within a rath, a circular earthen enclosure of the sort that once served as a farmstead for an early medieval Irish household. The entrance, set into the rath's bank on the north-west side, is a slab-covered opening just large enough to admit a person, leading down into a stone-lined corbelled chamber roughly 1.9 metres north to south and 1.7 metres east to west, roofed with a single large slab. From there, the creepway runs south-east into an earth-cut passage of around four metres in length and approximately one metre wide. Towards the south-east end, the passage narrows and shows signs of partial collapse, with the floor raised by accumulated infill. After the slab was struck during ploughing in the 1970s, the landowner partially cleared the passage in an attempt to follow it further, though its full extent remains uncertain.

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Pete F
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