Souterrain, Knocknagroagh, Co. Clare

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Settlement Sites

Souterrain, Knocknagroagh, Co. Clare

On a six-inch Ordnance Survey map from 1916, a small feature at Knocknagroagh in County Clare is labelled simply "cave".

The word is technically wrong, but the cartographers can perhaps be forgiven. What lies there is a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage built by hand, typically during the early medieval period, and used variously for storage, refuge, or both. The label "cave" suggests that by the early twentieth century the structure had already lost its cultural legibility, reduced in local memory to a hole in the ground with a roof over part of it.

The souterrain sits in the western sector of a rath, a circular earthen enclosure of the kind that once formed the farmstead of a relatively prosperous early medieval household. The two features almost certainly belong together, the underground passage serving the homestead above. The structure runs northwest to southeast, measures roughly three and a half metres in length and two metres wide, and at its southeastern end drops to only about sixty centimetres in depth, where it is now partially unroofed and overgrown. At the northwestern end, a roofed lintel passage leads to a room that is no longer accessible. Around two metres east of that roofed section, a large boulder, nearly two metres long, and a collapsed hollow in the ground suggest the presence of at least one further chamber, though the full extent of what was built here remains unclear beneath the accumulated debris of centuries.

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