Souterrain, Garravoone, Co. Waterford

Co. Waterford |

Settlement Sites

Souterrain, Garravoone, Co. Waterford

Somewhere on a south-facing slope in County Waterford, a small underground chamber was found, filled in, forgotten, and then found again. That cycle of discovery and concealment is itself part of what makes this site quietly interesting. A souterrain, which is a man-made underground passage or chamber typically associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, was first uncovered here around 1920, only to be deliberately backfilled shortly afterwards. For roughly fifty years it sat sealed beneath the hillside, its existence noted but unexamined.

When researchers reopened the site in the early 1970s, what they found was modest but telling. The base of an oval chamber, measuring approximately 2.4 metres by 2.1 metres and surviving to a depth of around 1.8 metres, had come through intact to two courses of stonework, standing to about 0.8 metres in height. Two entrance passages, one extending to the east and one to the northwest, had not fared as well and were found in a destroyed condition. The work was documented by P. Kealy and J. Ryan, whose 1973 report in the Old Kilkenny Review remains the primary account of the structure. The oval plan of the chamber is worth noting; souterrains vary considerably in their layout, and the form here, combined with the dual passage arrangement, would have been a reasonably substantial construction in its original state.

The site sits towards the lower end of a south-facing slope, a position that would have offered both practical drainage and proximity to whatever settlement the souterrain once served, though no further detail about associated surface features appears in the published record.

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