Souterrain, Lisnagree, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Settlement Sites

Souterrain, Lisnagree, Co. Kerry

On the flat coastal plain that skirts Tralee Bay, roughly 275 metres from the shore, there is almost nothing left to see.

A barely discernible raised area in the ground is all that remains of a ringfort, the roughly circular enclosure of earthen banks that served as a farmstead and defended homestead for an early medieval Irish family. The fort was levelled within living memory, yet beneath or beside it, documented before the destruction, was the entrance to a souterrain, a stone-lined underground passage or chamber typically used for cold storage and, in times of danger, as a refuge.

When members of the County Kerry Field Club visited in 1946, the ringfort was still substantially intact. At the centre of the enclosure they recorded an oblong foundation measuring 35 feet by 20 feet, roughly 10.6 metres by 6 metres, most likely the footprint of a substantial rectangular building. In the western sector of the fort they found a blocked-up opening leading into the souterrain. No further details of the underground structure were recorded at that point, leaving its extent and character a matter of inference. The site sits within the broader landscape surveyed by Judith Cuppage in her 1986 archaeological survey of the Corca Dhuibhne region of the Dingle Peninsula, a project that catalogued hundreds of monuments across that unusually dense archaeological terrain.

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