Souterrain, Caher, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Settlement Sites

Souterrain, Caher, Co. Kerry

On the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry, the Ordnance Survey maps mark a circular cashel, the kind of dry-stone enclosure common across early medieval Ireland, at a site near Caher.

Nothing is there now. No wall, no outline, no earthwork. The enclosure known as KE036-007 has left no visible trace on the ground whatsoever.

What makes the site linger in the record is a single reported detail. Within the cashel there was reputedly a souterrain, an underground passage or chamber built, typically in early medieval times, for storage or refuge, and when the stones of the enclosure were being cleared away in 1832, large bones were found inside it. The removal itself tells one story: by the early nineteenth century, a structure that had likely stood for over a thousand years was being demolished, its stones carted off for other uses, a fate that befell countless such sites across the country during that period. The bones were noted but not investigated in any systematic way, and the detail survives only as a fragment, recorded much later in J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Corca Dhuibhne region. Whether the bones were human or animal, the record does not say.

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