Cave, Knocknageeha, Co. Mayo

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Settlement Sites

Cave, Knocknageeha, Co. Mayo

Buried within a ringfort at Knocknageeha in County Mayo is a souterrain, an underground stone-built passage and chamber complex of the kind constructed throughout early medieval Ireland, typically for storage or refuge.

What makes this one worth noting is the unusual way you would enter it: not through a doorway at ground level, but through a hole in the roof of the larger of its two chambers. That detail alone sets it apart from more straightforward examples of the type.

The structure consists of two chambers connected by a low creepway, a deliberately cramped linking passage that would have forced anyone moving through it to slow down considerably, which may well have been the point. Chamber 1, the smaller of the two, runs east to west and measures 4.7 metres in length, though its height varies dramatically, from as little as 0.24 metres at one end to 1.36 metres at the other. It is roofed with at least five large flat lintels and has an infilled section at its eastern end that may represent where the original entrance once stood. A lintelled doorway at the western end of the south wall, just 0.6 metres high and 0.8 metres wide, leads into the creepway, which runs north to south for 2.3 metres before opening, via a sill stone, into Chamber 2. This second chamber is significantly more generous: 9.6 metres long, 1.7 metres high, and 1.5 metres wide, oriented east to west like the first. It has been disturbed by digging at various points, which is common in souterrains that attracted later curiosity or opportunistic excavation. The whole structure sits within a ringfort, the circular earthwork enclosure associated with early medieval farmsteads, suggesting this souterrain served a settlement of some standing in its day.

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