Knockdhu basement
Knockdhu Souterrain ( Irish : Cnoc Dhubh, ( English black hill ) - Black Hill) is an example of a complex basement . It is located near Carncastle in County Antrim in Northern Ireland , about eight kilometers northwest of Larne .
Of the more than 3,000 known (estimated 30-40,000) basements in Ireland, some 100 are concentrated in the north-east of the Ulster province . They are structurally more complicated than Breton , Cornish , Danish and Scottish basements. A distinction is made between “rock-cut”, “earth-cut”, “stone built”, “timber built” and “mixed” basements.
Knockdhu is a ( stone-built ) basement, which is now accessible through a vertical access tube. It consists of over six corridors (or chambers) connected by narrow passages, not all of which have been explored. The total length of the corridors is around 35 m. The corridor accessible from the entrance is blocked in one direction (presumably to the former entrance) after a short distance. In the other direction, the trapezoidally widening first corridor, formed from dry masonry , splits after a few meters into a short chamber on the left with a long ventilation section and the access area to the remaining corridor-like chambers. The slightly lower area with the second chamber is reached by a kind of slip. From here the inner section is reached with four more corridors, each six to eight meters long, all of which are on the same level and are connected to one another by crawl spaces. Gears 1–4 are almost on one axis. From fourth gear, a crawler gear in the middle of the right-hand side leads to fifth gear. This runs in the opposite direction parallel to the fourth. The sixth corridor is accessible from the end of the fourth corridor and runs roughly at right angles to it. Most of the hallways, except the innermost, are dry and there is a lot of debris on the floor.
See also
literature
- Mark Clinton: The Souterrains of Ireland. Wordwell, Bray Co. Wicklow 2001, ISBN 1-869857-49-6 .
Web links
Coordinates: 54 ° 53 '28.5 " N , 5 ° 54' 0.2" W.