Cave, Coolnafarna, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Settlement Sites
At Coolnafarna in County Mayo, a souterrain, an artificial underground passage or chamber typically associated with early medieval settlement, was significant enough to be marked on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1838, labelled simply as 'Cave'.
By the time later map editions were produced, it had vanished from the cartographic record entirely. Today, there is no visible trace of it at ground level.
The 1838 mapping places it in the north-west quadrant of a rectangular field, which is itself thought to have formed part of a larger enclosure. That same field boundary was still legible on the 1916 Ordnance Survey edition, suggesting the landscape retained some structure even as the souterrain itself dropped out of official documentation. Whether the underground feature collapsed, was filled in, or simply ceased to register as a known landmark at some point between those two surveys is not recorded. What remains is a field, and a name on an old map, and the reasonable inference that something once lay beneath.