Souterrain, Knockane, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Souterrain, Knockane, Co. Kerry

In the corner of a field on rising ground in Knockane, Co. Kerry, a collapsed underground passage sits quietly inside an earthen enclosure that has overlooked the surrounding landscape for well over a thousand years.

The souterrain, now largely fallen in, was once a stone-lined subterranean tunnel or chamber, the kind built throughout early medieval Ireland as a place of refuge, storage, or concealment beneath or adjacent to a settlement. What remains today is a curved depression and four large slabs, the bones of a structure that has been sinking back into the earth for centuries.

The souterrain sits within a bivallate rath, meaning a roughly circular enclosure defined by two concentric earthen banks, a form of enclosed farmstead associated with early medieval occupation in Ireland. The inner area is sub-circular, and the souterrain occupies its north-eastern sector, cutting into the internal face of the inner bank before curving eastward. It measures around 2.6 metres wide, with what appears to be an entrance on the eastern side at roughly 2 metres across. Between the curved bank of the souterrain and the inner bank of the rath, the ground dips into a U-shaped hollow about 0.6 metres deep, and it is here that the four surviving stone slabs lie. The structure was already recorded as a feature on the Ordnance Survey map of 1939, suggesting it had been a visible landmark in the field for generations before it was formally noted. The archaeological survey of North Kerry, compiled by C. Toal and published in 1995, provides the foundational description of the site.

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