Cave, Cloran, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Settlement Sites

Cave, Cloran, Co. Galway

At Cloran in County Galway, a stretch of ground gives away its secret only if you know what you are looking at.

A shallow linear depression, roughly six metres long and smothered in vegetation, marks the line of an underground passage that has not been entered in a very long time. Three stone lintels push up through the turf nearby, the only part of the structure that remains fully visible, hinting at the roof of a chamber just below the surface.

The structure is a souterrain, an underground passage or chamber built during the early medieval period, typically drystone-lined and roofed with large flat slabs, and used for storage, refuge, or both. This one runs north to south for more than ten metres in total, with a chamber at its northern end that measures around four metres in length, though that chamber is now almost entirely blocked. The souterrain sits within the northern half of a cashel, a type of stone-walled enclosure associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, suggesting it was once part of a working farmstead or small defended homestead. The site was noted by Knox in 1918 and recorded again by Cody in 1989, by which point the passage was already inaccessible. What survives above ground today amounts to little more than a faint scar in the landscape and three displaced lintels, the remainder sealed beneath centuries of accumulated soil and growth.

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