Souterrain, Knockroe, Co. Kilkenny

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Settlement Sites

Souterrain, Knockroe, Co. Kilkenny

Beneath a field at Knockroe in County Kilkenny, there is almost certainly a souterrain, a stone-lined underground passage or chamber of the kind built throughout early medieval Ireland, most often for storage or refuge.

Nobody has excavated it. The evidence for its existence is a single dark smear on an aerial photograph, described in survey records as a "sausage-shaped" cropmark, the kind of telltale discolouration that appears in dry summers when grass or grain above a buried feature grows differently from the vegetation around it, betraying hollow or disturbed ground beneath.

The photograph in question, reference GB89.Q.39, was taken in July 1989 and reveals considerably more than just the possible souterrain. The cropmarks show an oblong, rectilinear enclosure defined by a fosse, a defensive or boundary ditch, with its entrance facing south. Within that, a second fosse marks out an inner curvilinear enclosure, also entered from the south, and it is inside this inner zone that the souterrain cropmark sits. The nested arrangement, an outer rectangular enclosure containing a rounded inner one, is the kind of layout associated with enclosed settlements of the early medieval period, sometimes referred to loosely as ringfort complexes, though the rectilinear outer element here gives it a slightly unusual character. The site has never, as far as the available record shows, been the subject of ground investigation, so the souterrain remains unconfirmed, its length, construction, and condition entirely unknown.

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