Midden, Ceathrú An Lisín, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Settlement Sites
At the base of a limestone escarpment on Inis Meáin, the middle island of the Aran group, there is a place where people once ate, discarded, and left behind the traces of daily life in the form of a kitchen midden, the accumulated refuse of a settlement, shells, bones, ash, and broken objects compressed into layers that archaeologists can read like a slow diary.
The cave mouth it adjoined is still there, partly blocked. Everything else has vanished from the surface.
The spot is known locally as Réidh na hUanach, a name bound up with legends attached to the natural cave, as Tim Robinson noted in 1980. In 1933, a researcher identified in the records as Mac Domhnaill described the location as cliff dwellings showing traces of a kitchen midden at the entrance, suggesting that the cave had once served as a shelter or habitation of some kind, with the midden marking the threshold where domestic waste collected over time. The site overlooks Baile an Mhothair, a settlement on Inis Meáin, and the escarpment setting would have offered both protection and a commanding view of the surrounding landscape. No surface archaeology has survived, which is not unusual for a midden in an exposed Atlantic environment, but the name Réidh na hUanach points to a longer local memory of the place, one that outlasted the physical evidence by some margin.
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