Souterrain, Weston, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Settlement Sites

Souterrain, Weston, Co. Galway

What remains of this site is mostly absence.

Somewhere within an old enclosure at Weston in County Galway, a souterrain, an artificially constructed underground passage or chamber typically associated with early medieval settlement, once ran beneath the ground. By the time anyone thought to record it properly, it was already gone, destroyed or sealed during land clearance in the 1950s. All that survives now is a shallow depression in the southern half of the enclosure interior, roughly two metres long and one metre wide, sinking no more than thirty centimetres into the earth, oriented roughly north to south. It is the kind of feature that most people would walk across without a second thought.

The souterrain was known locally as a partially collapsed cave before the land clearance work finished what time and subsidence had started. Souterrains are found across Ireland in significant numbers, most often linked to ringforts and enclosed settlements of the early medieval period, where they served variously as storage spaces, refuges, or escape routes. Whether this one had been associated with the enclosure from its original construction, or was an addition of a later period, is no longer possible to determine. The 1950s clearance erased whatever structural evidence might have answered that question, leaving only local memory and a slight hollow in the ground as the record of its existence.

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Pete F
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