Souterrain, Shanbally, Co. Cork

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Settlement Sites

Souterrain, Shanbally, Co. Cork

Beneath a sports field in Shanbally, Co. Cork, passages and chambers are sealed away underground, their entrance lost to overgrowth and, at some point in the early 1990s, a quiet collapse of the earth above them.

The site is a souterrain, an underground structure of the early medieval period typically cut from earth or built from stone, used for storage, refuge, or both, and it sits within a rath, the circular earthwork enclosure that was the standard farmstead form in Ireland from roughly the sixth to the twelfth century.

Local accounts recorded that the souterrain was accessible as recently as the 1960s, when its entrance, measuring just under a metre wide and about two-thirds of a metre high, could be found in the south-eastern quadrant of the rath. Those who entered described a network of passages and what may have been chambers beyond. The proximity to a sports field proved significant: at some point in the early 1990s, a section of the field collapsed, presumably into the void beneath, and the hollow was filled in. By 2004, heavy overgrowth had made the rath itself difficult to approach, and the opening to the souterrain could no longer be located at all. The structure, in other words, has effectively disappeared from the surface record within living memory, swallowed first by ground movement, then by vegetation.

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