Souterrain, Tuar An Chladáin, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
On a south-facing mountain slope between Coomacarrea and Meenteog, above the Owroe river valley on the Iveragh Peninsula, there is a terraced ledge holding the remains of eight stone huts.
Most visitors to Kerry, if they come this way at all, would see only the open hillside. But tucked against the best-preserved hut at the northern end of this cluster is something less immediately legible: the entrance to a three-roomed semi-subterranean stone chamber, each room averaging roughly 2.2 metres long, a metre high, and a metre wide. The place carries two names locally. One is Clochán na gCaorach, which associates it with sheep. The other is Uaigh an Duine, a phrase that translates more uneasily as something like "the grave of the person" or "the person's burial place".
The structure is a souterrain, a type of underground or partly underground chamber built from drystone corbelling and roofed with flat lintels, found across early medieval Ireland and associated variously with storage, refuge, and settlement activity. What makes this example notable is its layout: three distinct chambers extending in different directions, westward, northward, and eastward, radiating from a single entrance point beside the hut. The corbelled walls, where stones are laid in overlapping courses to form a self-supporting roof, survive here without mortar, relying entirely on careful placement and the weight of the hill above. The association with the eight huts on the same ledge suggests a community of some kind once used this terrain intensively, though precisely when or in what capacity the landscape does not readily say. The dual local names hint at a long and layered memory of the place, one practical, one suggesting something more solemn.