Cave, Correenfeeradda, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Caves & Shelters
On the 1927 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, a small annotation appears in antiquarian typeface at the northern edge of a quarry on the south side of Knockainy Hill in County Limerick.
It reads: Áine Cliar's Cave. The cave itself, by that point, may already have been under threat. By the time the scholar O'Kelly came to write about it in 1944, it was gone entirely, consumed by the gradual expansion of the quarry that had encroached upon it. What remains is only a map name and a bracketed word: site of.
Áine Cliar is a figure from Irish mythology, a goddess or sovereignty figure associated with Knockainy Hill, known in Irish as Cnoc Áine, one of the more significant sites in the landscape of County Limerick connected to the Munster otherworld tradition. The cave that bore her name was described by O'Kelly as small, formed in the limestone rock characteristic of this part of the county. Limestone landscapes of this kind are prone to the formation of natural caves through the slow dissolution of rock by slightly acidic groundwater, a process known as karstification, and such features were often freighted with local meaning long before they were recorded by surveyors. The 1927 OS map entry is the clearest documentary evidence of the cave's existence, and O'Kelly's note from 1944 is both its fullest description and its obituary.
An aerial photograph taken in September 2002 and held in the Archaeological Survey of Ireland's collection shows the quarry site as it appeared nearly six decades after O'Kelly's account. Correenfeeradda lies in a quiet stretch of south County Limerick, and Knockainy Hill itself remains a landmark in the area, its mythological associations still discussed in local and academic contexts even where the physical features that once gave them a focal point have disappeared. There is nothing to see at the cave site now, which is precisely what makes the map entry worth knowing about: a name preserved in antiquarian script on a sheet of paper, marking the place where something was.