Souterrain, Curry, Co. Mayo

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Settlement Sites

Souterrain, Curry, Co. Mayo

In the south-east corner of a rath near Curry in County Mayo, there is a shallow oval hollow in the ground, roughly eight metres across at its longest and barely forty centimetres deep, ringed by a loose scatter of small stones.

It is not much to look at, but that depression may be all that remains visible of a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber used in early medieval Ireland typically for storage, refuge, or both. When a souterrain collapses inward over time, it leaves precisely this kind of subtle scar in the earth.

The hollow sits within a rath, the type of circular earthen enclosure that served as a farmstead during the early medieval period, broadly from around the fifth to the twelfth century. Raths are among the most common archaeological monuments in the Irish landscape, and souterrains are frequently found in association with them, built beneath or adjacent to the domestic structures inside the enclosure. The pairing here at Curry follows that familiar pattern, though the souterrain itself, if that is indeed what caused the hollow, has long since given way. The scattered stones around the perimeter and across the base of the depression are consistent with the kind of structural material that would have formed the walls and roof of such an underground feature before the weight of soil above finally brought it down.

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