Quarry, Creevagh, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Mining

Quarry, Creevagh, Co. Clare

In the rocky ground of Creevagh, County Clare, a single upright stone slab stands in a landscape of exposed crag bedrock and hazel scrub, and nobody is entirely sure what to make of it.

The slab is not especially large, measuring just under a metre in height, a little over a metre wide, and only ten centimetres thick, yet it is firmly set, deliberately placed, and classified in official records as a possible megalithic quarry. That last designation is the curious part. A megalithic quarry is a site where large stones were extracted or worked in prehistory, often identifiable by splitting marks, wedge holes, or partially detached slabs still attached to the parent rock. Here, the evidence is thin: a single marker stone, some flat sheets of natural bedrock, and the category of "possible".

Tom Coffey first recorded the site in 1994, and it was subsequently listed as a megalithic quarry in the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996. The surrounding terrain, rough pasture broken by rocky outcrops and patches of hazel scrub, is typical of the Clare landscape where the Burren's limestone logic bleeds into the surrounding countryside. The flat sheets of exposed crag bedrock in the area are suggestive: in prehistory, naturally cleaving limestone like this would have been a practical source of material for the orthostats and capstones used in the megalithic tombs that are so numerous across this county. Whether the upright slab was set as a marker, a boundary stone, or some kind of indicator of a worked area is not resolved. Its firmly embedded base implies intent, but intent is about as far as the evidence takes us.

The site sits amid open rocky ground, and the slab itself, modest in scale but deliberate in placement, is the main thing to look for. The flat exposed bedrock nearby gives some sense of what might have attracted prehistoric workers to the spot in the first place.

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Pete F
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