Souterrain, Mannin, Co. Mayo

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Settlement Sites

Souterrain, Mannin, Co. Mayo

Beneath a grassy hollow in County Mayo, there may be a tunnel that nobody has entered for centuries.

The depression is easy to miss, a shallow dip in the ground measuring roughly three and a half metres across and less than half a metre deep, running for eleven metres through the interior of an ancient earthwork before narrowing to about one metre wide for a final three metres to the north-north-east. What it suggests, though not yet confirmed, is a souterrain, an underground passage or chamber typically constructed during the early medieval period in Ireland, often built from dry-laid stone and used for storage, refuge, or both. Here, the roof appears to have given way at some point, leaving only the outline of the tunnel pressed into the earth like a scar.

The depression sits within the south-western quadrant of a rath, a type of circular earthen enclosure, sometimes called a ringfort, that served as a farmstead or settlement in early medieval Ireland. The rath itself shows signs of erosion along its bank at the south-south-west, and it is from this damaged section that the souterrain passage, if that is what it is, appears to originate and extend inward. At the narrower, north-north-eastern end of the depression, a heap of field clearance stones has been dumped, partly obscuring whatever lies beneath. These stones, gathered at some point from surrounding farmland and tipped into the hollow, are an accidental kind of archive, suggesting the site has been recognised as a convenient receptacle long after anyone thought much about what it might originally have been.

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Pete F
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