Cave, Killinny, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Settlement Sites

Cave, Killinny, Co. Galway

On an 1838 Ordnance Survey map of County Galway, a small annotation appears in Roman script near the townland of Killinny: the word "Cave", sitting quietly some 70 metres to the south-west of a local church.

It is a detail easy to overlook, yet it marks the recorded location of what may once have been a souterrain, an artificially constructed underground passage or chamber, typically built during the early medieval period and used variously for storage, refuge, or ventilation of settlements above ground.

The story of how it came to light is brief and frustratingly incomplete. According to local information, the feature was uncovered during farm-building operations, the kind of accidental discovery that has brought so many buried structures to attention across Ireland. Beyond that, the record goes quiet. When the site was later inspected, no visible surface trace had survived. Whatever was there had either been disturbed beyond recognition or lies so thoroughly buried that nothing remains to see from ground level. The 1838 map, then, preserves what may be the only reliable record of its existence, a single word inked onto paper by a surveyor who evidently thought it worth naming.

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Pete F
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