Souterrain, Mullaghawny, Co. Mayo

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Settlement Sites

Souterrain, Mullaghawny, Co. Mayo

Beneath a gently sloping field in Mullaghawny, Co. Mayo, there is believed to be a souterrain, an underground passage or chamber of the kind typically built during the early medieval period in Ireland, often for storage or refuge.

There is, however, nothing left to see. No entrance, no depression in the turf, no stone lintel poking through the surface. The only clue above ground is a telegraph pole, said by local people to stand a few metres from where the structure lies buried.

The site has a quietly complicated history even on paper. It does not appear at all on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1838, suggesting it was either unknown to surveyors at the time or already obscured. By the 1930 edition of the same map, it had been marked, though only as a generic 'Cave', a label that hints at local awareness without offering much precision. Local tradition holds that the souterrain passage ran eastward, which would be a meaningful detail if the structure were ever investigated, since the orientation and extent of such passages can indicate how they were used and when they were built. That possibility became considerably more remote in the early 1990s, when a rise in the ground in this part of the field, likely the last faint surface echo of what lay below, was levelled during agricultural work.

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Pete F
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