Cave, Connaberry, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Caves & Shelters
High on the face of a limestone gorge along the Awbeg River, south of Castletownroche, a narrow fissure opens into a small cave that has produced two quite different kinds of evidence: the bones of ice-age animals and the debris of later human activity.
The combination is not unique in Irish cave archaeology, but it is always quietly arresting. The entrance crack, just one and a half metres long, leads into a chamber roughly four metres deep and two metres wide, from which a passage and narrow gallery extend further into the rock. It is a modest space by any measure, but what came out of the ground there makes it worth knowing about.
The cave, sometimes referred to as Foley Cave after the listing compiled by Dowd in 1997, was one of three neighbouring caves in this gorge investigated in 1938 and 1940, with the findings published by Gwynn and colleagues in 1942. Excavation focused on the outer fissure and the chamber. The shallowest layer of deposit, around thirty-five centimetres deep, yielded charcoal, a fragment of burnt bone, a small baked clay ball, and pieces of iron, suggesting some episode of human use or occupation, though the precise period is difficult to pin down from these finds alone. Beneath that layer, the intermediate and deep deposits told a much older story: a wide range of Pleistocene fauna, meaning animals from the ice age period that ended roughly twelve thousand years ago. Irish limestone caves frequently preserve such remains because the rock's chemistry slows decay and the caves themselves can act as natural traps into which animal carcasses, or the prey of predators sheltering inside, gradually accumulated over millennia.