Souterrain, Cartronboy, Co. Longford

Co. Longford |

Settlement Sites

Souterrain, Cartronboy, Co. Longford

Beneath a field of level pasture in Cartronboy, Co. Longford, there is a stone-lined underground chamber that nobody can currently enter, because it has been deliberately buried again.

That is the quietly strange situation with this souterrain, an early medieval underground passage or chamber typically constructed from dry-stone walling and used for storage or refuge, which was partially uncovered during works in 1992 and then filled back in, returning it to invisibility.

The structure sits at the western edge of what may be a ringfort, the circular enclosures that pepper the Irish countryside and typically date from the early medieval period, roughly the sixth to the twelfth centuries. Samuel Lewis, writing in his Topographical Dictionary of Ireland in 1837, described the site as a cavern containing several chambers within the area of what he called a Danish rath, a term reflecting the older, mistaken belief that such earthworks were Viking in origin. When the chamber was briefly exposed in 1992, it offered a rare glimpse inside. The visible portion was rectangular, measuring just over five metres on its longer axis and about one and a half metres wide. The walls were built in corbel fashion, meaning each course of stones was laid slightly inward over the one below, narrowing toward the roof, which was covered by a series of flat lintels. The chamber was more than half filled with earth and debris at the time, and a lintel visible over a rear passage could not be reached. Shortly after this examination, the chamber was filled in and is no longer visible at ground level.

There is nothing to see here now in any conventional sense. The souterrain lies sealed beneath ordinary farmland, its dimensions recorded but its interior inaccessible. What makes it worth knowing about is precisely that combination: a structure described in a nineteenth-century gazetteer, briefly glimpsed in the late twentieth century, and now submerged again, intact in the dark.

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