Cave, Lisdrumneill, Co. Roscommon

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Settlement Sites

Cave, Lisdrumneill, Co. Roscommon

There is a cave marked on Ordnance Survey maps of Lisdrumneill in County Roscommon, and almost nothing else is known about it.

It appears on both the 1837 and 1914 editions of the six-inch OS map, labelled simply as a 'Cave', yet it leaves no trace whatsoever at ground level. No description of it has ever been recorded. It is, by any measure, a cartographic ghost.

What makes the situation stranger still is the inconsistency between the two maps. The 1837 edition places the cave within the interior of a nearby rath, a type of circular earthwork enclosure used as a farmstead or defensive settlement throughout early medieval Ireland. By the time the twenty-five-inch map was produced, the same feature had shifted to outside the rath, to the south-west. Whether this reflects a surveyor's revised opinion, a different interpretation of a local account, or simply an error compounded over decades is impossible to say. A rath of this kind would typically have enclosed a domestic space, and souterrains, which are man-made underground passages often associated with such sites, are not uncommon finds within or alongside them. Whether what the mapmakers recorded here was a natural cave, a souterrain, or something else entirely remains an open question.

The site sits in that peculiar category of places that are, in a formal sense, documented but not known. Two separate surveys, separated by nearly eighty years, agreed that something was there. What it was, what it looked like, and where precisely it begins and ends are details that have simply never made it into the record.

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Pete F
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