Cave, Ballynalacka, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Settlement Sites

Cave, Ballynalacka, Co. Galway

In the townland of Ballynalacka in County Galway, the Ordnance Survey's six-inch maps record a feature labelled simply "Cave", sitting close to the centre of a nearby enclosure.

It is the kind of notation that invites curiosity, a name implying depth, darkness, perhaps ritual or refuge. The difficulty is that there is nothing left to see. The site is now occupied by a silage pit, and no visible surface trace of the cave survives.

The enclosure it was associated with is itself a suggestive presence. Enclosures in this context typically refer to the ringforts or cashels that dot the Irish landscape, circular boundaries of earth or stone that once defined farmsteads, assembly places, or sites of local significance. A cave positioned near the centre of such an enclosure would have been a notable feature, possibly used for storage, shelter, or purposes that archaeology struggles to recover without excavation. The six-inch OS maps, surveyed in the nineteenth century, captured the name at a point when some memory or physical trace of the feature was still legible in the landscape. Whatever the cave amounted to at that time, it has since been absorbed into the working agricultural ground around it.

What remains is a gap in the record rather than a place to visit. The silage pit that now marks the location is an unremarkable fact of farm life, but it carries a small, quiet irony: one of the more evocative entries on an old map, a cave at the heart of an ancient enclosure, replaced by the most functional of modern agricultural structures.

Rated 0 out of 5

Visitor Notes

Review type for post source and places source type not found
Added by
Picture of Pete F
Pete F
IrishHistory.com is passionate about helping people discover and connect with the rich stories of their local communities.
Please use the form below to submit any photos you may have of Cave, Ballynalacka, Co. Galway. We're happy to take any suggested edits you may have too. Please be advised it will take us some time to get to these submissions. Thank you.
Name
Email
Message
Upload images/documents
Maximum file size: 100 MB
If you'd like to add an image or a PDF please do it here.

Advertisement