Souterrain, Farranmanagh, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Settlement Sites

Souterrain, Farranmanagh, Co. Kerry

At Farranmanagh in County Kerry, local knowledge preserves the memory of something that the ground no longer reveals.

Somewhere beneath a rath, the circular earthwork enclosures built predominantly in the early medieval period as farmsteads and defended homesteads, there may be a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber that was typically used for storage or as a place of refuge. The detail passed down is specific enough to be intriguing: steps, reportedly located in the centre of the rath, once led downward into the earth. No visible trace of them remains today.

Souterrains are not uncommon features within raths across Ireland, and their association with settlement activity from roughly the sixth to the twelfth centuries is well established. What makes this particular example unusual is the degree to which it has retreated from the physical record entirely, surviving only in the kind of local oral information that occasionally finds its way into formal documentation. The rath itself is recorded, catalogued under its own separate monument reference, but the souterrain it may contain sits in an ambiguous category, a possible feature, reported rather than confirmed, with no stonework, collapse, or depression now visible at the surface to corroborate the tradition.

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