Cave, Bullaunagh, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Settlement Sites
In a field in Bullaunagh, Co. Galway, what looks like a slight hollow in the ground is actually the collapsed remains of an early medieval underground passage, its roof long since fallen in and its interior choked with rubble.
The local name "cave" is doing modest work here: this is a souterrain, a type of stone-lined underground structure built during the early medieval period, typically associated with ringforts and cashels and thought to have served as storage spaces, places of refuge, or both.
The souterrain sits within the south-west quadrant of a cashel, a cashel being a stone-walled circular enclosure of the kind that served as a farmstead or settlement during the early medieval centuries in Ireland. What survives of the underground passage measures roughly five metres in length, just under two metres wide, and a little over a metre in height, built in drystone construction without mortar. Most of the roof lintels have collapsed, and the rubble that has accumulated inside makes it impossible to read the space as it once was. The passage runs on a north-west to south-east axis, and there are good reasons to think it did not end where it appears to today. A slight depression beyond the access point, and further undulations in the ground stretching some six and a half metres to the east and south, suggest the original structure extended considerably further in that direction before it was sealed by collapse and time.