Souterrain, Kilcurrivard, Co. Galway

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Settlement Sites

Souterrain, Kilcurrivard, Co. Galway

Beneath a patch of ordinary pastureland in Kilcurrivard, County Galway, there is said to be a cave.

Local knowledge insists on it. The Ordnance Survey mapped it, marking the spot with a small open circle on the third edition of the six-inch sheet, published in 1933. Yet visit the site today and you will find no opening, no hollow in the ground, no shadow of an entrance. Whatever lies beneath has been thoroughly swallowed by the landscape above it.

The structure in question is a souterrain, an underground passage or chamber built, typically in early medieval Ireland, from stone-lined walls and roofed with large flat slabs. They were dug or constructed beneath farmsteads and ringforts, and served variously as cool storage for dairy produce, as places of refuge, or as escape routes. The 1933 map shows this particular site sitting among outcropping rock, the kind of broken, stony ground where such a structure might have been built into natural fissures or concealed within a rocky outcrop. By the time the ground was examined in any detail, that outcropping had been reclaimed and smoothed into pasture, and the surface trace, if there ever was a visible one, had gone with it. What remains is essentially a name, a dot on an old map, and a local memory of something underground.

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Pete F
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