Souterrain, Robeenard, Co. Mayo

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Souterrain, Robeenard, Co. Mayo

Beneath a field in Robeenard, County Mayo, there may be a passage that nobody has entered in a very long time, if indeed it exists at all.

Local tradition holds that a souterrain, an underground stone-lined tunnel or chamber built during the early medieval period, runs beneath a site that was once a rath, the circular earthen enclosure typical of early Irish farmsteads. The rath itself has been levelled, erased by centuries of agriculture or land clearance, leaving no obvious surface trace of what may lie below.

The tradition is specific in a way that gives it a certain weight. The souterrain is said to extend northward from the levelled rath toward a second rath nearby, that one also now gone from the landscape. The idea of a subterranean passage connecting two such enclosures is not without precedent in Irish archaeology; souterrains were used for storage, refuge, or concealment, and they sometimes ran considerable distances. Whether this particular passage is real, partially real, or the kind of local memory that attaches itself to unremarkable ground over generations, is an open question. Both raths have been removed, and no excavation appears to have confirmed what, if anything, threads through the earth between their former positions.

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