Souterrain, Derryleagh, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Settlement Sites

Souterrain, Derryleagh, Co. Kerry

On a low rise in rough upland pasture in Derryleagh, the ground tells a story mostly through what it can no longer conceal.

Roofing lintels, each averaging around 1.2 metres in length, lie exposed on the surface, tracing the outline of a souterrain that has partially collapsed into visibility. A souterrain is an underground stone-lined passage, typically associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, and thought to have served for storage, refuge, or both. Here, those lintels mark out an L-shaped route: a passage running west for 2.6 metres before turning south for a further 4 metres, the whole structure sitting just 4 metres west of the scant remains of a subcircular hut.

The site sits between two tributaries of the Ardsheelhane river, south of River Hill on the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry. The hut foundations nearby are very poorly preserved, rising only to around 0.4 metres in height, with walls roughly 0.8 metres thick, and the overall footprint measuring approximately 6.8 by 6.4 metres. Together, the hut and souterrain suggest a small, self-contained settlement, the kind of modest upland habitation that was once scattered across this landscape and has since largely dissolved back into it. The souterrain itself is now inaccessible, the passage choked or collapsed, but its form is legible from above in the arrangement of fallen stone. The site was recorded and described in A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan's archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula, published by Cork University Press in 1996, which catalogued dozens of such sites across South Kerry, many of them equally overlooked.

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