Cave, Ballygunnermore, Co. Waterford

Co. Waterford |

Settlement Sites

Cave, Ballygunnermore, Co. Waterford

What survives of this site in Ballygunnermore, County Waterford, is essentially nothing; a bank of earthwork, and within it, no visible trace of what was once carefully documented as a stone-roofed underground chamber. That absence is itself the story. The structure was destroyed around 1888, shortly after it was recorded, which means the description that exists is almost the entire archaeological legacy of the place.

The chamber was recorded by the Reverend P. Power, who published his account in the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland in 1887 to 1888, under the heading "Casey's 'lios'", the word lios referring to a ringfort or enclosed homestead. Power described an oval space measuring roughly 3.8 metres north to south, 2.1 metres east to west, and about 1.8 metres high, roofed with flat stone lintels laid horizontally across the top. At its northern end there was an entrance creep, the narrow low passage typical of souterrains, the type of underground stone-built structure commonly associated with early medieval Irish settlements and thought to have served for storage or refuge. The chamber sat within the eastern part of the enclosure's bank. What Power recorded was, in all likelihood, a souterrain that had survived intact inside the earthwork for perhaps a thousand years before being cleared away in the late nineteenth century.

The enclosure bank at Ballygunnermore still exists, and the spot where the chamber once lay can in theory be located within it, though there is nothing to see at ground level. The significance of the site lies in the precision of that single Victorian description, a set of measurements and observations that now stands as the only material record of something that no longer exists.

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