Souterrain, Boolacullane, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Souterrain, Boolacullane, Co. Kerry

Beneath a field at Boolacullane in County Kerry, there may be two stone chambers connected by underground passages, built from slabs so large that the people who found them in the 1940s decided it was safer not to go in.

That is more or less all that can be said with certainty, and the uncertainty itself is part of what makes the site worth knowing about.

A souterrain is an underground stone-lined passage or chamber, typically associated with early medieval ringforts and used for storage, refuge, or both. This one sits within a rath, the Irish term for a circular earthen enclosure of the same period, a form of farmstead that once dotted the landscape in enormous numbers. When members of the Kerry Field Club visited the site in 1946, they recorded what they described as two connecting underground hut sites composed of immense slabs of stone. The scale of the stonework gave them pause; the minutes from that visit, published in volume two of the club's records, note that the chambers were considered too dangerous to enter. Whether that caution was structural or simply practical is not recorded. What is recorded is that no visible surface remains survive today, meaning the site has effectively vanished from view, leaving only the 1946 description as evidence that anything was ever there.

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