Souterrain, Poulbaun, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Settlement Sites
At a cashel in Poulbaun, County Clare, there is a structure that may or may not still exist, depending on who you ask and when they looked.
A cashel, for context, is a stone-walled ringfort, and within this one a souterrain was once mapped. A souterrain is an underground stone-lined passage or chamber, typically associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, used variously for storage, refuge, or ventilation of a dwelling. The curious detail here is not the souterrain itself but its ambiguous status: present on one record, absent from another.
Robinson's map of 1977 marks the souterrain clearly within the cashel. When fieldworkers returned to inspect the site in 1997, however, no trace of it was recorded. That gap of twenty years, and the silence that followed the second visit, leaves the feature in an uncertain state. It may have become obscured by vegetation or collapsed ground cover, or it may simply have been missed. Souterrains are notoriously easy to overlook; their entrances can be narrow, overgrown, or deliberately concealed, and many have been recorded only after accidental discovery. Whether Robinson's mapping was based on a visible feature or on earlier documentary evidence is not clear from what survives.