Souterrain, Duagh, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Settlement Sites

Souterrain, Duagh, Co. Kerry

At the entrance to Gleann Locha, near the south-eastern bank of the Meennascarty river, there is a souterrain that nobody has ever found.

What remains instead is a single stone slab, thin and rectangular, with a neat rectangular hole cut into one side, measuring 33 centimetres wide and 18 centimetres high. This is almost certainly a porthole slab, the kind of stone used to divide the chambers of a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber typically associated with early medieval settlement, used for storage or refuge. The slab now lies loose within an oval enclosure at the site known as Kilcumlaghta, or Cill Cumnachta. The souterrain it once belonged to has not been located.

The enclosure at Kilcumlaghta is itself a layered place. Within its stone walls stand the foundations of an early church, and scattered across the interior are numerous grave markers, the remnants of its use as a calluragh, a burial ground, often associated with unbaptised infants or others excluded from consecrated parish burial. Just outside the enclosure wall lies a bullaun stone, a boulder with one or more cup-shaped hollows ground into its surface, commonly found at early ecclesiastical sites across Ireland. A fragment of a rotary quernstone was also recorded at the site in 1945, adding another trace of the domestic or agricultural activity that once surrounded the church. The porthole slab was documented in detail by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula.

What makes the site quietly strange is this gap between evidence and object. The porthole slab is specific and physical, a stone shaped for a clear architectural purpose, yet the structure it served has left no confirmed trace. The slab sits among grave markers and church foundations, repurposed by time into just another loose stone in an enclosure that has accumulated centuries of use, loss, and quiet forgetting.

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Pete F
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