Souterrain, Cashelboy, Co. Sligo

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Settlement Sites

Souterrain, Cashelboy, Co. Sligo

In the north-eastern corner of a rath at Cashelboy in County Sligo, two grassy hollows sit quietly in the ground, their significance easy to miss unless you know what to look for.

They may be all that remains of a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber constructed during the early medieval period, typically used for storage or refuge. What was once a subterranean structure has apparently caved in on itself, leaving only depressions in the earth and the occasional stone pushing up through the turf as evidence of what lay beneath.

The rath itself, a circular earthwork enclosure of the kind built across Ireland between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries, provides the context for these features. Within its north-eastern quadrant, the first hollow runs approximately four metres on a north-east to south-west axis and two metres across, reaching a depth of around 0.65 metres, with stones visible along its interior sides beneath the sod. About two metres to the north-east of this lies a second, more roughly circular depression, around four metres in diameter and 0.4 metres deep, pressing up against the inner face of the rath's bank and containing its own covering of sod-covered stone. The positioning of the two hollows relative to each other, and to the bank, is consistent with the layout of a collapsed souterrain, though the word "may" carries real weight here; without excavation, certainty remains out of reach.

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