Souterrain, Páirc An Teampaill, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Souterrain, Páirc An Teampaill, Co. Kerry

Four large flagstones lying flush with the ground in the western part of an old church enclosure on the Dingle Peninsula mark something that most visitors, if they noticed it at all, would likely walk straight past.

Beneath those stones, a shallow depression, roughly two metres long, half a metre wide, and thirty centimetres deep, is almost certainly the entrance to a souterrain, an artificially constructed underground passage or chamber, typically built during the early medieval period and used variously for storage, refuge, or concealment. The site sits in the valley between the central mountain range and the Sea Hill ridge, on a slight rise that opens out to a wide view of the surrounding landscape.

The enclosure here is associated with Teampall Mártain, also known as An Teampall Liath, St. Martin's Church, and it shares its ground with a burial site recorded as the Calluragh burial ground. The souterrain itself was noted in the Ordnance Survey Name Books, the nineteenth-century field records compiled during the mapping of Ireland, which recorded local placenames and features of interest, including at Minard. Within the enclosure, aside from the church remains, two earthen mounds are also visible: a low oval mound to the south-west and an L-shaped mound, less than half a metre high, a little further south. The archaeological survey of the Corca Dhuibhne, or Dingle Peninsula, carried out by J. Cuppage and published in 1986, provides the primary description of the complex, situating it within the broader pattern of early ecclesiastical settlement along this stretch of the Kerry coast.

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