Souterrain, Brackloon, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Souterrain, Brackloon, Co. Kerry

Beneath the pasture at the base of Knockafeehane mountain on the Dingle Peninsula, there may be a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber built during the early medieval period, typically used for storage or as a place of refuge.

The uncertainty matters here. This is not a site where archaeologists have excavated a tidy plan and issued confident conclusions. It is a place where the ground keeps its own counsel.

The site is a univallate rath, a circular enclosure defined by a single earthen bank and ditch, set on a west-facing slope in undulating pasture land. Such raths were the farmsteads of early medieval Ireland, and it was not unusual for their occupants to dig souterrains beneath or adjacent to the enclosure. The possible souterrain at Brackloon was first noted by Ashe in 1954, and the observation was later incorporated into J. Cuppage's thorough 1986 survey of the Corca Dhuibhne region, which catalogued the remarkable density of archaeological features across the Dingle Peninsula. Whether the passage Ashe identified has ever been properly investigated is not clear from what survives in the record, which leaves the site in an ambiguous but quietly interesting state, a rath with a rumoured underside.

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