Cave, Attinaskollia, Co. Mayo

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Settlement Sites

Cave, Attinaskollia, Co. Mayo

At Attinaskollia in County Mayo, there is a place that appears on two generations of Ordnance Survey maps and yet leaves no trace whatsoever on the ground today.

Marked simply as "Cave" on the six-inch OS maps of 1838 and 1929, what is recorded here is a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber typically associated with early medieval ringforts, used variously for storage, refuge, or ventilation. Both the souterrain and the ringfort it once belonged to have since vanished entirely, leaving a field that gives no outward sign of what once lay beneath it.

The souterrain sat on the western perimeter of a ringfort, the kind of enclosed circular settlement, bounded by earthen banks or stone walls, that was a common unit of rural life in early medieval Ireland. By the time the first Ordnance Survey teams arrived in the 1830s to produce their meticulous six-inch maps of the country, the souterrain was already being called a "Cave" by local people, a label that stuck through to the revised mapping of 1929. At some point after that, the ringfort itself was levelled, most likely through agricultural clearance, and with it went any surface indication of the underground feature. Nothing remains visible at ground level today.

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