Souterrain, Ballygrady, Co. Cork

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Settlement Sites

Souterrain, Ballygrady, Co. Cork

At Ballygrady in north County Cork, there is an archaeological site that has, in the most literal sense, disappeared into the ground.

Five depressions recorded in the 1930s are thought to mark the collapsed remains of souterrains, the stone-lined underground passages or chambers that early medieval Irish communities built beneath and beside their settlements for storage, refuge, or both. Today, none of these depressions are visible at the surface. The site exists primarily as a set of measurements on a page.

The record comes from Bowman, writing in 1934, who noted the depressions in some detail. One sat in the north-east corner of an enclosure, a roughly circular or oval earthwork of the kind that defined farmsteads across early medieval Ireland, and covered approximately 42 square yards to a depth of around seven feet. Four further depressions lay due east of this first one, outside the rampart of the enclosure, with the most easterly sitting some 27 yards from the rampart itself. Bowman concluded they were evidently the sites of souterrains. The spread of these features, both inside and outside the enclosure boundary, is itself mildly unusual and hints at a settlement that was more extensively used than the surface today would suggest. What caused the depressions, whether gradual subsidence of collapsed roofing, deliberate infilling, or agricultural levelling over the intervening decades, is not recorded.

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