Work in Progress. Files I am currently working on made available for comment and submissions regarding new discoveries etc. Comments and Submission can be made via the Submissions option in the Notes and Queries Section of this website or via the Contact Us option.
Temporary location for Bibliography until uploaded to the Bibliography Section of the Website.
Analysis of the A1 class
Analysis of the A2 class
Analysis of the A3 class
Analysis of the B1, B2 and B3 classes
Analysis of the C1 class
Analysis of the C3 class
A listing of classified and unclassified souterrain for County Cork compiled from research undertaken unto 1977.
An attempt to see what lies beneath the townland and civil parish systems in an effort to glimpse at the earlier ecclesiastical - and social, geography of the parish, and thereby to contextualise its souterrains. The location of Kilmichael's land area can be identified using placenames on the Ordnance Survey of Ireland's Discovery Series, Sheets not. 85 - 86.
Tabulation of field drawings, sketches, and 'conjectural reconstructions of plans based on verbal descriptions', created between 1750 to 1977. A further file covering sites surveyed by J.P. McCarthy 1976-1977 along with some conjectural reconstruction drawings for sites recorded by others in the form of verbal accounts or rough outline drawings, will be uploaded as time allows in the coming months.
Attempting to trace the tribes.
Souterrains and Cork Baronies.
Unpublished photographs.
Site survey work in Cork 1975-77
A Vikings at Donoughmore scenario? Anglo-Saxon issues?
In progress.
In progress.
How did the French term Souterrain become a generic term for medieval subterranean structures discovered in the Irish landscape?
A Poem about the Dissolution of Irish Monasteries
A listing of site drawings and sketches created for Cork souterrains between 1750 and 1977 AD.
A poem in early draft. Hamilco or Himilco?
Lost Place-names.
A smattering of hand written notes and travel photos. Under consideration and preparatory to typed text of 'Viking Farmers East Cork to Dungarvan : Work in Progress 2' as in file of this same name below.
Under consideration!
Draft, typed, text for this topic.
Pilmore, a Forgotten Harbour with a Big History? Fanciful or Factually So?
Field and Desk notes.
Field and Desk notes.
Field and Desk notes.
Field and Desk notes.
Field and Desk notes.
Field and Desk notes.
Field and Desk notes.
Field and Desk notes.
Why do most of the Ogham stones discovered in Ireland occur in South Munster? What impact did the Synod of Whitby have on the use of Ogham inscribed stones given that the end date for the inscriptions and for Whitby are so close in time? Was RAS Macalister correct in suggesting that Whitby dealt a crushing blow to the HIbernian church?
Outposts of the initial Norman conquest and settlement of Cork. A western border site in MacCarthaigh lands? It is of interest to know that in Norman times Cahir Abbey in County Tipperary was known as Kaherdunesche i.e. Cahir, Dún, Esche...meaning a chair ( drystone enclosure which was an administrative Dún residence which was 'esche' what did this last word mean? Was it an attempt in Norman French to write Uisce meaning water or was it to do with being in a high, prominent place or having an elevated e.g. military status or administrative castle-like status? If so how was the dún contextualised by the abbey?
St. Abbán. Buried according to tradition at the Cluain beyond St. Gobnait's Holy Well in Ballyvourney. A pilgrimage there once. His well. Ogham stones beside his reputed grave. A wheel cross with a figure in robes and with a staff walking round it at the Cillini nearby. Gobnait, his sister or sister in Christ?
Poll na Sagart...(Hole or Pit of the Priests), penitential pit, prayer cell, bell cell, anchorite cell. In Gaelic 'Poll na Sagart'. A concept of the Medieval ecclesiastical world, not later times. Not to be confused with Priest Hole i.e. a place for a priest to hide in the times of the Penal Laws, though perhaps the Poll na Sagarts still known in some local / parish landscapes were used / re-purposed as such in those times of need.
Slave ship, Pirate ship, Roman ship or post-Roman, a glass cargo and a wharf at Dunworley after a great storm.
Did the Irish monks in Iceland, known as the pappar, travel to the North American coastline centuries before the Vikings? Did the 'Greater Ireland' of the Icelandic Landnamabok have irish monks based there and if so does this give credence to the Navigatio Brendani as a tale about such a connection - as the outcome of white martyrdom by means of braving the Atlantic and letting God be their guide wherever the sea took them? Was 'Greater Ireland' , indeed, 'the Next Parish West' of Ireland's Wild Atlantic Way?
Remnants of the Mediterranean Bronze Age in South Munster? What if?
Data sheet
Tuatha Saxon = The petty kingdom of the Saxons. If Berihert's three sisters were at Drishane / Cullen nearby and his brother John at Mushera mountain then were they half Gaelic and were they active in these parts of Duhallow as part of an inheritance; given that some intermarriages between Gaelic princesses of Munster and Anglo-Saxon lords took place? Does the spread of cell place names shown in this sketch map and stretching beyond the area shown indicate an extensive locality of semi-cenobitic settlement, of individual cells, cluain enclosures, as well as gorts, garranes and garraí etc? To what extent did the imposition of Roman Christianity immediately post-Whitby Synod in 664 AD impact on an existing monastic landscape or did all of it appear as a consequence of Berihert and his host of Saxon 'monks' there?
A poetic exploration of ideas about an anchorite, a subterranean cell and the Cúile (corner or allocated place / space) of a Cluain hermitage, in early medieval Irish Christianity. But note also the very similar word Cuile as used in souterrain in Sardinia ( Italy ) and associated both with shepherds as well as with Byzantine monks.
Note that the Latin word for a penitential place is Carcer. Also that word Cúile translated as the place-name element Cool... Note also the occurrence of the word Carcair near the great Corcomroe Abbey - in the vicinity of an earlier foundation - in the Burren, County Clare. Also a Carcair Mór townland name in County Donegal.
What untold story about how the monasteries of early Christian Ireland evolved into the great, well landed in their demesnes, and famous across Christiandom, 'Celtic' monasteries of post 7th century date i.e. post Whitby, awaits a detailed telling? How might it relate to the story of souterrains beneath the Munster landscape and to the story of Ogham stones and the ogham script / cipher, as found in abundance in South Munster? See also article by J. P. McCarthy and Prof. Michael Dolley re the Castlefreke / Rathbarry hoard of Anglo-Saxon coins from a souterrain close to the Rosscarbery coastline, published in The Numismatic Circular Vol. LXXXV, No.11, Nov. 1977.
Further thoughts and queries See also re the distribution maps for Rath place names and Lios place names across the Irish landscape Irish Place Names by Deirdre Flanagan and Laurence Flanagan, 2002, Gill and MacMillan, Dublin. p. 111 and p. 135. Note : When writing the Dane's Rath piece, in this file, I had forgotten that the surname in this reference was Flanagan not O'Flanagan...
Early monastic settlement beside Roaring Water Bay and Aghadown Parish, West Cork? Were they part of a complex of early monastic hermitages and cells stretching across the West Cork peninsulas? If so, how different such peninsular monastic settlements from say that at Mount Athos in Greece? As to the axes and the souterrain in which they were found were they contemporary in some way with the creation and original use of the souterrain ( known locally as a poll faoi talaimh in this case) or were they discovered at a later point in time, say during field working in this once heavily settled Bronze Age landscape, and due to curiosity or superstition placed in a souterrain created and used during the Iron Age or Early Medieval period? For information on the Paddock/ Aghadown souterrrain and its axe-heads, see J. P. McCarthy's short article's in the Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society online at corkhist.ie
Containing references for work by UIS Commission re Map of Underground Heritage of Mediterranean Area and also considerations re a Classification scheme for artificial cavities.
Nartex: Using the word nartex in the context of a dromos (pasage) and tholos (circular cell) structure, what I mean by nartex is a very simple definition of this architectural form. What I mean is that the ‘entrance’ (dromos) which leads to the tholos is just ‘passage’, a very short e.g. just the main doorway or long passage unfolding from that doorway. I do not mean it in the sense of a portion of the entrance of a church which is separated from the central aisle by a door and expanded laterally to become a porch.
Materials for a study thereof !
Materials for a study thereof !
Materials for a study thereof !
Materials for a study thereof !
Cogitations !
Part 5 of Edmund Spenser and the Faerie Queene in the Souterrain Lands of the Kingdom of Desmond (South Munster)
This 1907 publication worth an evaluation in the light of modern historical research and scholarship across a variety of disciplines?
Some thoughts about the Womanagh River (East Cork) and its locality; and its northern tributaries the Dissour and Kiltha rivers.
Initial enquiries.
Between Killeagh and Castlemartyr. Dissour and Kiltha rivers. Womanagh river. Mogheely. Pilmore Harbour.
De Bello Gallico. Venetii. Brittany. Galicia. West Cork. Ireland. Eoghan Mór.
Sileve Mish County Kerry, Cnoc Osta (Mount Gabriel) of West Cork.
Did Charlemagne annex Bavaria and Saxony? If so, then does their souterrain heritage have any connection with that of the lands of Gaul? ....the Schottenkloster and South Munster (Ireland)...Irish monks and scholars at the Court of Charlemagne... Does this require further enquiry in the context of seeking a link between certain types of Irish souterrain architectures and those in Gaul as well as Bavaria and Saxony? No file as yet, as this topic under consideration.
Some 'Thought Experiments' through the medium of Poetry. Note: The word Botháiníocht which appears in one of the poems heroes misspelt. The correct spelling is Bothántaíocht. The March 12th 2023 'Final draft' attached below is not in fact the final draft; something which for some poets is not an uncommon scenario as sometimes the muse fails to sit still and rest after the race has been declared to be over!
With its extension / overlap / influence upon the growth of Archaeological Studies and Record Creation in the Cork region and surrounding environs up to the 1st half of the 20th century. Notes for a work in progress.
Old Head, Frescoes, shed, outbuildings, Kinsale
Old Head, Vikings, Roman, Territory, Cearmna, Carmen, Carman, wrecks, Dunworley, Promontory forts, Christianity. Carmen...a Latin word? Meaning a chant, a song, a verse of a poem. In the pagan Roman World and perhaps into that of the early evangelising Christians and synchronising of traditions, meaning 'priests' chanting at a public event (festival?). See Horace context perhaps...Carmen Saeculare and associated explanations and meanings...implying a place with a local festival influenced by Roman annual practices e.g. of Roman settlers or native seeking to behave as Romans, at a such as place? A festival of Carmen remembered but later, in medieval texts, mis-spelled as Cearmna...and an uncoupled memory of it as a Carmen place e.g. an established trading station / settlement / a potential bridgehead and garrison, where annually Greek merchants brought items of gold and wore fine raiments?
Includes both DeMontmorency DeMarisco and FitzStephen as Mac Sleighne at Rostellan etc...some thoughts in progress....Saint Patrick on De Coursey's coinage... his ambition to carve out and rule a kingdom of his own, attempting to absorb local saints and customs and establish legitimacy to rule in a conquered territory through such processes...? Liscarrol in north Co. Cork as an early Norman rectangular fortress...a grandson of FitzStephen builds Liscarrol...the base element of Siddon's tower below the slate course...a remnant of an ancient tower or just a folly(?) shown in a 19th century photo east of the great 'Castle' ... its armoury where a 16th century Claymore was described as Brian Ború's sword, Old Town on the first edition the Ordnance Survey 6 inch situated roughly within what could fancifully be a projected rectangle derived from a diagonal line from Siddon's Tower to the 'Folly' tower beside the site of the Castle's Chapel?...fact or fiction...and a LiDAR in a flying machine? ...and the remnants of a pier by a viewing tower, one built upon a wall tower, a watch tower, beside the tide washed remnants of a once robust stone pier end-dropping into the deep of the Veynus (Latin?...i.e. Venir?) Channel...many an old caravel or 'lighter' moored in moonlight by the township and castle ... and a drift by East Ferry past Marloag heading to Cuskinny of the coins of ancient Rome ... echoes along maritime 'roads' and forgotten marshland rivers beneath the flood where the tracery of slob-land streams and rivulets may still remain. And what of those castle wine cellars mentioned in the story of the 17th century siege of Rostellan and what of limestone caves there mentioned in Lewis' Topographical Dictionary and what of a scribe and his hermit brethren in early medieval times there...and what of lepers and a holy well and a carved slab and a medieval church and a leper spittle (medieval monastic 'hospital') by the Farsid of Rostellan. And what of the history of cellars and cellarers in Cork city and at the great houses of Cork County, some sites derived from confiscated monastic demesnes, others from later times?...and what of the medieval wine trade in Cork and its antecedents...and its pottery evidence from amphorae to wine jugs from Sontange and Bristol ...connections to Biscay bay and perhaps Acquitania and the Corcú (Corca) Laoidhe's Gascon of its genealogies tending vines...
Booleying, souterrains of A1 Class, Cork, Muskerry, Donoughmore (Donaghmore), Cellars cool, root cellars, apple cellars. Butter market. Booley. Boolalisheen. Social life. Agricultural. Dairy. Milk. Cattle. Cheese. Old Butter Road. Shournagh River. Nagles. Medieval. Agriculture. Ireland. Hartnett. Farming. Monasteries. Hermitages. Demesne. River Lee. Inis Luinge. Kilcullen. Kilmartin. Caherveelane. Mourne Abbey. Ballyhooley. Cider. Blackwater River.
1. To the poem Myth-crafting the South West, to the verse Roinn Romhánach has been added 'a Mushaira of poets hold court close distant of Mushera Mountain' (Mushera Mountain, County Cork, by the Paps of the Goddess Anú). In Persian and Urdu a Mushaira is a symposium of poets who link the free-expression, free voicing of one poem to the next across the gathering, the end line of one poetic contribution becoming the start line for another and so on, under the guidance of the host of the gathering ...almost like a fear-an-tí at a traditional Irish folk-music and storytelling session. This had a context very much within the tradition of bothántaíocht...villagers gathering in the evening at a neighbour's home / cabin. 2. The word Bothántaíocht has now been corrected in section 7 Home Devastations, of the poem Swirls in a Memory Pool where it was wrongly spelt as botháiníocht. 3. The Conference of Birds is a long, classic, Persian poem written by the poet Attar.
Little Island, Cork harbour, Promonntory Fort, Bishop, Lappan, Clashavodig, Ballintrasna. Clash, Carrigrenan, Carrigrennan. Celles. Killeens. Kileens. Monastic cells. Cillíní. Promontory fort. early Saints. Lappan. Bishop. Souterrain. Souterrains. Lough Mahon. Ostman Cork. Clash. Vodig. Ballintrasna. land drainage. marsh. marshland. land reclamation. Glanmire to Dunkettle (Dun of a Viking called Ketil ...a common Viking / dane's name?), to North Esk to Harper's island to Glauntaun. How does all of this tie into the land reclamation schemes beside the medieval town of Corke which began to expand rapidly in the second half of the 17th century to become a canal city and then even more so in the first half of the 18th century? Did the word Vodig in Clashavodig have anything to do with the word báide have an association with bháidigh in earlier forms or dialects of the Irish language? If so, then does Fr. Dinneen's Dictionary have give báidhe as a 'bay', 'a navigation' ( passing from the Corcach Beag (little marsh) by the the harbour mouth and the sea, to the Corcach Mór (big marsh) by Cork city, a 'navigation' via Lough Mahon overlooked by Little island, and a small thatched fishing village at Ballytrasna perhaps beside a fosse which once allowed the sea to flood the ditch (clash) and cut off the headland of Carrigrennan, with beached local style (yawl) fishing boats; like Ringaskiddy, or Guileen, or Aghada as in a 19th century sketch...see studies of local traditional fishing boats in Ireland?
Work in progress!
If it is Irish merchants, among others, who are mentioned by 12th century Jewish traveller Benjamin of Tudela (Spain) as frequenting Alexandria's great harbour, then what might this say about their use of ancient sea routes stretching well back in time to the Age of Rome's Empire and even further back? What might it say about early Irish Christianity and the influences of Egyptian monasticism? What might it say of myths created which spoke in Irish scriptoria of Gaetholos and his Egyptian bride, of the acquisition of Egyptian learning by his followers, of tribal conflicts in his homeland needing resolution, of a druid seeking a far land westward in the sea mist? What might it also say about a reference to Taprobane (Sri Lanka)in the Annals of Inisfallen? What might this say about sources (Irish, Scottish, English?) for early writing about the places of the Holy Land e.g. St. Adomnán of Iona's account? And what of Bob Quinn's Atlantean Irish and Berbers and sean nós singing learned 'from the monks' and what of an Arabic Muishira court of poetry and Gaelic courts of poetry and places sounding like Mushera Mountain in Sliabh Luachra, North West Cork, and some scholars seeing Arabic in coastal place names on old maps...and what of those centuries when West Cork pirates made the annual round to Barbary...and what of centuries of West Cork coastal trade with Spain when it was under Arabic control? What history lies unwritten?
Tartessus? Los Millares of the Bronze Age....? What are the possibilities...Gaytholos said to have been a warrior from Spain with a band of warriors who went to Dacia to fight for the king there and was successful but then the king sought to murder him so he and his warriors left for Egypt. But then in Egypt one of his warriors was tasked to learn the knowledge wealth of this society. The Gaelic language is created using the best of a babble of languages there...the Delta area...north European warriors settled there?...Gaytholos wins battles for Pharaoh, marries one of several Pharaoh's daughters..Scotia..she leaves with him, he returns to Spain and sotrts out the problem there and then his druid see Ireland in a mist (from túr Brigantium in Galacia?) and he goes to West Cork / Iveragh coastlines and a conquest begins...???? Any truth in this from an Iberian myth-histories or legends scholarship perspective or is it all just local Irish fiction created in medieval monastic scriptoria ? No file for this as yet...just a kernel of thoughts...
In thinking, on an ongoing basis, about why those underground man-made structures in Ireland and Scotland which are classified using the term souterrain, and about why Wales and England - apart from Cornwall, do not appear to have them, the following recent publication is of considerable interest: Roffey, Simon (2023) An Archaeological History of Hermitages and Eremetic Communities in Britain and Beyond. Routledge, Oxon. Perhaps there is something to be said here about cultural memory and evidence for the nature of memory loss, about the concept of sattelzeit (saddle period i.e. periods of transition across locally defined phases of time in the context of degrees of resistance to impacting technological change occurring within local / remote communities distant from major settlement focal centres, centres of trade and of skilled artificers, places where faster rates of change and creativity hold sway, where entropy bubbles more rapidly), about perceptions of human capability in ancient technological worlds, about psychological frameworks for creating interpretative narratives and vantage points for same, about the nature and definition of the pace of time as a driver of accumulating topographical layer creation, about the shunting of hides and tofts in earlier iterations of townscapes and parochial precincts (of ploughlands, carhoo quarterings and stangs and the history of land conveyancing), about ongoing shuffled and reshuffled patterns in the strategies of best use of available land within the compass of monastic precincts and associated land parcels, or seen as stacking and transience in defining the history of compositional changes in aggregated land surfaces resulting in what were once unassociated becoming associated only at another time dropping some land patches in favour of others, changes created by local communities as economies and land use patterns change in response to ownership, need and custom, reconfiguring landscape vistas and vantage points across time, and about climatic and social changes in local circumstances, about regional ogham stone concentrations, about parish founder saints - and their followers, and the origins of these people native or foreign and about the secular lives they may have lived and been once known for, and about the architectural natures of both masonry constructed and tunnelled artificial cavities, about wars over doctrinal factions and tribal traditions within attempted religious reforms, about the burial of memorials to preserve tangible witnesses of those 'gone before', about the sacredness of memory inscribed rather than its readability, about meditations upon relics and the stairway to heaven? Are there reflections of Anglo-Saxon Christianity i.e. of a Roman and non-Gaelic world view within Anglo-Saxon Britannia in its eremitical tradition, a different syncretisation there? Or reflections of a post-seventh century asceticism with different eremitical traditions spreading post Whitby to Ireland and ending a Coptic tradition in Ireland? Did a post 12th century eremitical revival bring a different approach to hermit habitations, ones either group or solitary, as some within the Middle Ages sought a solitary return to early monastic traditions of seclusion and asceticism? Was there a return to the wilds of remote landscapes at this time, a return of coenobites, semi-coenobites and solitaries along with a return of traditions of the cave? Was Agnes de Hereford, an anchoress at Cork, of this tradition, and were there more persons in the vicinity like her i.e. not living in the tradition of early Gaelic monasticism but in that of the Third Order of European monastic tradition, which was by then well established in Norman Ireland?... monastic traditions of Clonmacnoise compared with those of Mellefont Abbey?