Souterrain, Moneyveen, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Settlement Sites

Souterrain, Moneyveen, Co. Galway

On a low hillock in the undulating grassland of north Galway, a shallow rectangular hollow roughly seven metres long sits quietly in the ground, oriented north-east to south-west.

It is a modest feature to the untrained eye, easily mistaken for a dip left by some agricultural accident, but it is almost certainly the collapsed roof of a souterrain, an underground passage or chamber built in early medieval Ireland, typically used for storage, refuge, or ventilation within a settlement.

The hollow sits within the north-western quadrant of a circular rath, the kind of enclosed farmstead that was the standard unit of rural life in early medieval Ireland, where a family and their livestock lived within a bank-and-ditch enclosure. This particular example measures about 24.3 metres in diameter and is defined by two concentric banks with a fosse, a ditch, running between them. Double-banked raths are comparatively less common than single-banked ones and are sometimes associated with higher-status occupants, though little else can be said about who lived here or when. The site is poorly preserved. The outer bank has been lost along the western and northern sides, leaving the circuit incomplete, and the interior feature that may once have been a roofed underground space is now just a depression in the turf. What remains is a quietly legible outline of a settlement type that once covered the Irish countryside in its thousands.

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Pete F
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