Souterrain, Coarha Beg, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Souterrain, Coarha Beg, Co. Kerry

On elevated pasture above Coarha Beg on Valentia Island, a low bank running across the hillside conceals something easy to walk past without a second glance: the entrance to an underground passage, built without mortar and roofed with flat stone lintels, pushing back into the earth toward the south-east.

This is a souterrain, a type of drystone-lined underground chamber or tunnel found widely across early medieval Ireland, most often associated with settlement sites and thought to have served as refuges or storage spaces. The entrance survives in the western face of an eight-metre stretch of bank, though the passage itself is no longer accessible.

The souterrain is only one part of a broader complex of structures on this patch of well-drained ground. Close by are the remains of a polygonal hut with an annex and, to the south, the poorly preserved foundations of a circular hut, now reduced to a sod-covered mound of collapsed stone measuring roughly 4.7 metres by 4.3 metres across. Polygonal and circular hut forms are characteristic of early historic and early medieval Irish settlement, and the grouping of several structures together suggests a farmstead of some kind, occupied and perhaps modified over time. A little to the south-east, and evidently from a later period altogether, stand the earth and stone foundations of a large rectangular house, measuring ten metres by just under six metres internally, with a few upright stones still marking the inner wall-face and a scatter of collapsed material, including one notable quartz block, filling the interior. The co-existence of these different structural phases, each in varying states of preservation, gives the site an accidental quality of a long-occupied place slowly returning to the ground.

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