Souterrain, Kilcloony, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Settlement Sites

Souterrain, Kilcloony, Co. Galway

All that marks the site today is a shallow circular hollow, roughly three metres across, in the ground at Kilcloony.

There is no masonry, no visible stonework, no indication to a passing eye that this unremarkable depression once sat within a ringfort and concealed an underground passage that had survived, more or less intact, for well over a thousand years.

A souterrain is a man-made underground chamber or series of chambers, typically constructed during the early medieval period in Ireland and associated with nearby settlement enclosures such as ringforts. They are generally thought to have served as places of refuge or cool storage. The Kilcloony example was recorded as a two-chambered cave, described by Costello in 1903 as being of the usual type, suggesting it conformed to the standard form of dry-stone corbelled construction common across the country. It was still notable enough to warrant a named entry on the third edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map published in 1932, even if by that point physical access to or from the structure may already have been restricted. Local information indicates it was destroyed in the late 1970s, leaving only the hollow that can be seen today. The ringfort within which it originally sat remains as a separate recorded feature, though the souterrain itself is now entirely gone.

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