Souterrain, Tubrid Beg, Co. Kerry

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Settlement Sites

Souterrain, Tubrid Beg, Co. Kerry

Beneath a field in Tubrid Beg, Co. Kerry, there are shafts dropping thirty feet into the earth, now sealed and silent.

They once formed part of a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber typically associated with early medieval settlement, used variously for storage, refuge, or purposes that archaeologists still debate. The shafts themselves are gone from view, closed up at some point for safety, and what remains above ground gives only oblique hints at what lies beneath: a shallow depression roughly six metres south of a central mound, and a second filled shaft somewhere to the north.

The earthwork surrounding all of this was originally bivallate, meaning it had two concentric enclosing banks, a form of rath or ring-fort that implies a site of some status in early medieval Ireland. The outer ring has been entirely removed, leaving no visible trace, so what survives today is a single bank with an external fosse, the ditch that once ran alongside the rampart. Inside that enclosure, near the centre, sits a circular mound measuring roughly 7.2 metres north to south and 7.8 metres east to west, rising about 1.2 metres from the surrounding ground. Its precise function is not recorded, but its position at the heart of a defended enclosure gives it obvious significance. The details about the shafts and the lost outer bank come from the landowner rather than from excavation, which means the full picture of what was here remains genuinely open.

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