Souterrain, Coomlogane, Co. Cork

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Settlement Sites

Souterrain, Coomlogane, Co. Cork

Beneath a field at Coomlogane in Mid Cork, a stone-lined underground chamber sits in the dark, sealed off from the world and leaving no mark on the surface above it.

The chamber was found in 1965, recorded, and then backfilled, returning the ground to something like its previous appearance. There is nothing to see there now, which is precisely what makes it worth knowing about.

The structure is a souterrain, a type of underground passage or chamber built during the early medieval period in Ireland, typically associated with ringforts and used variously for storage, refuge, or ventilation of living quarters. This particular example was a single rectangular room, stone-lined on all sides, measuring roughly 3.2 metres in length, 1.25 metres wide, and 1.5 metres high, with its long axis running northeast to southwest. It appears to have formed part of a ringfort, one of the enclosed farmstead sites that were common across Ireland between roughly the sixth and tenth centuries. McCarthy's 1977 reference provides the earliest published account of it. The dimensions suggest a fairly modest but complete chamber, tight enough that a person would have had to crouch to move through it, but substantial enough to have served a practical purpose for whoever built and used it.

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