Souterrain, Gleann Fán, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Settlement Sites

Souterrain, Gleann Fán, Co. Kerry

On a south-facing slope above the Glanfahan river valley on the Dingle Peninsula, a cluster of early medieval structures sits quietly beside one another, each revealing a different degree of survival.

The most complete is a circular drystone hut known as Clochán Dubh, built using corbelled construction, a technique in which stones are laid in overlapping courses that gradually close inward to form a self-supporting dome without mortar. It survives to a height of 3.5 metres with a diameter of 5 metres, and its lintelled doorway at the south-east is still standing at full height. What makes the site particularly curious is the low aperture cut into the inner face of the southern wall at ground level, barely half a metre high and apparently leading inward for at least a metre and a quarter. It is thought to connect to a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber of the kind used throughout early medieval Ireland, likely for storage or refuge, which was discovered roughly 3 metres south of the hut at the start of the twentieth century.

The hut is reached by a sunken external passageway, 3.8 metres long and nearly a metre deep, which channels approach to the lintelled entrance. A short distance to the north-west sits a possible bullaun stone, a large boulder with a deliberately hollowed depression in its upper surface, features associated with early Christian and pre-Christian activity across Ireland, their precise function still debated. A second clochán stands about 6.65 metres to the east-south-east of the first, though much of it has been lost, its fabric absorbed into a field boundary and buried under clearance debris, surviving now only to around a metre in height. The site appears in J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Corca Dhuibhne region, which catalogued the extraordinary concentration of early monuments across the Dingle Peninsula.

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