Cave, Newtown, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Settlement Sites
On the first Ordnance Survey maps of Ireland, drawn up in the 1830s, a small feature near Newtown in County Galway was marked simply as "Cave".
That name alone is a kind of puzzle. Whatever the cartographers recorded there, nothing of it remains visible above ground today.
The cave sat within the interior of a rath, the type of circular earthen enclosure, usually ringed by one or more banks and ditches, that was commonly built as a farmstead during the early medieval period in Ireland. Raths sometimes contained souterrains, which are stone-lined underground passages or chambers thought to have served for storage or as places of refuge. Whether the feature recorded here was a natural hollow, a souterrain, or something else entirely is no longer clear. By the time anyone thought to look closely, no surface trace survived to answer the question. The 1838 map is the only firm evidence that it was there at all.