Souterrain, Boherascrub, Co. Cork

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Settlement Sites

Souterrain, Boherascrub, Co. Cork

At Boherascrub in north Cork, a stone-built passage lies completely out of sight beneath ordinary ground.

There is no mound, no marker, no visible clue that anything is there at all. The ringfort that once enclosed it has been levelled, and what remains is the souterrain itself, an underground stone chamber of the kind early medieval Irish farmers constructed beneath or near their homesteads, most likely for storage or refuge.

When Cleary investigated the site in 1987, the structure was recorded as a single rectangular chamber, oriented east to west, measuring roughly 3.4 metres in length, 1.3 metres wide, and about 1.3 metres high. The roof was formed from flat lintels laid across the stone walls, a simple but effective technique that required no mortar. Access at the time of investigation was only possible through a point where one of those lintels had collapsed. At the eastern end of the chamber, a short creepway, just half a metre long and covered by a single slab, had been filled in. Creepways of this kind, narrow connecting passages between chambers, are a common feature of souterrains, and the presence of one here hints that further chambers may extend beyond it, as yet unexamined.

Because the site has no surface trace, there is nothing to see from ground level, and no straightforward way for a visitor to locate or examine it without specialist knowledge of the exact position.

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Pete F
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