Souterrain, Cloonmoyle, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Settlement Sites
Beneath a field in Cloonmoyle, County Galway, two stone-lined underground chambers have been slowly collapsing for centuries, their roofs long gone, their walls gradually surrendering to the earth above them.
What remains is still legible enough to be remarkable: a souterrain, that is, an artificially constructed underground passage or chamber built during the early medieval period, most likely for storage or refuge, tucked into the southern enclosure of a conjoined ringfort.
The structure consists of two chambers built in drystone, meaning the stones were laid without mortar, relying entirely on their own weight and careful placement to hold together. The first chamber, running on a northeast to southwest axis, measures 9.2 metres in length and 4.1 metres wide, and narrows towards its southwestern end, which suggests the original presence of a creep, a deliberately low and constricted passage between chambers that would have forced anyone moving through it to crouch, slowing an intruder considerably. The second chamber, slightly larger at 11.8 metres long and 4.7 metres wide, runs east to west and has largely subsided into a flat-bottomed hollow. Two corbels, stones that projected inward from the walls to support the roof above, remain in place at the southeastern end, small survivors of what was once a covered underground space. The souterrain sits within a conjoined ringfort, a pair of circular earthwork enclosures linked together, a form that suggests a settlement of some social complexity in the early medieval Irish landscape.
