Cave, Carrowbaun, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Settlement Sites
On the 1838 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of County Galway, a feature labelled simply 'Cave' is marked inside the northern sector of a cashel at Carrowbaun.
A cashel is a drystone ringfort, typically early medieval in date, built to enclose a farmstead or small settlement. That the cartographers noted a cave within one suggests something at least partly visible at the time of the survey, something worth recording. Nearly two centuries later, almost nothing remains to confirm it.
What the ground now shows is a rubble-filled hollow running north to south, roughly three metres in length. Whether the original feature was a natural fissure exploited by the cashel's occupants, a souterrain, which is an artificially constructed underground passage sometimes used for storage or refuge, or something else entirely, cannot be determined from what survives. The collapse and infilling that obscures it could have happened at almost any point between the mid-nineteenth century and the present. The cashel itself, the enclosing structure within which the cave sat, presumably provided the broader context, though its own condition is not recorded in detail.
What remains is essentially a cartographic ghost. The 1838 map preserves the name and the location; the hollow in the ground preserves the approximate position. The two pieces of evidence point at the same spot, but the thing they once described has, for now, gone to ground.