Souterrain, Ballynahow More, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Settlement Sites

Souterrain, Ballynahow More, Co. Kerry

On the steep southern slopes of Knocknadobar in County Kerry, a structure that was once a dwelling has quietly accumulated several different lives.

What stands here, partially collapsed and partly buried beneath its own fallen walls, began as a corbelled stone hut, a type of dry-stone building in which courses of flat stones are laid in overlapping rings until they close to form a domed roof. It is a respectable size, around five and a quarter metres in diameter and nearly two metres high at its peak, though much of the southern and western wall now survives only as a low mound of rubble. A cross wall was inserted at some point to divide the interior, and the northern section was converted into a sheepfold, a functional repurposing that was probably carried out long after the hut's original use had ended. The eastern entrance, once framed with lintels, is now blocked.

The more unusual element lies to the north-west. A low lintelled passage connects the main hut to a smaller annexe, roughly three and a half metres in diameter. When the Office of Public Works surveyor O'Connell examined the site in 1939, he interpreted this passage as a small souterrain, an underground or semi-underground stone-lined tunnel typically associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, often thought to have served for storage, refuge, or ventilation. The combination of a corbelled hut and a souterrain-like passage is not unheard of on the Iveragh Peninsula, where the rocky terrain made dry-stone construction both practical and durable, but the layering of functions here, domestic structure, storage passage, and later sheepfold, gives the site an unusual density of use compressed into a relatively modest footprint. The whole complex sits on rocky ground on the mountain's southern face, which may help explain both its construction method and its long survival, however partial.

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