Quarry, Doon, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Mining

Quarry, Doon, Co. Clare

A small hollow in the ground at Doon, Co. Clare has spent well over a century caught between two different ideas of what it might be.

Roughly D-shaped, measuring approximately 25 metres by 20 metres and no more than two or three metres deep, it sits quietly against a north-south field wall, its straight eastern edge pressed up against the stonework as though the two features have always been in conversation with each other.

The confusion about this site's identity is written into the maps themselves. The Ordnance Survey 25-inch map of 1893 records it plainly as a disused gravel pit, which would make it an unremarkable piece of agricultural and industrial history, the kind of small quarry opened to supply material for local road-making or field drainage and then abandoned. By 1916, however, the six-inch OS map shows it as a small circle of hachures, the conventional symbol used to indicate an earthwork of potential archaeological significance. That cartographic shift is telling. When archaeologists came to formally assess the site, it was catalogued in both the Sites and Monuments Record of 1992 and the Record of Monuments and Places of 1996 under the cautious designation of 'possible enclosure', the sort of label applied when a feature could be the degraded remains of an early medieval or prehistoric enclosure but the evidence does not quite clinch it. One detail adds to the ambiguity: there is no spoil mound associated with the hollow. Quarrying almost always produces displaced material that accumulates nearby, and its absence here is the kind of small anomaly that keeps the question open.

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Pete F
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