Quarry, Cross Beg, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Mining

Quarry, Cross Beg, Co. Clare

At Cross Beg in County Clare, there is a small earthwork that spent the better part of a century being quietly misread.

The feature was classified as an earthwork in archaeological records from the early 1990s, the kind of designation that suggests ancient human activity, defensive banks, or ritual landscape. In practice, what sits here is a gravel pit, long since worked out and abandoned.

The Ordnance Survey's 25-inch map of 1898 is unambiguous on the matter, marking the spot with hachures, the short radiating lines surveyors used to indicate slopes or scarps, and labelling it plainly as a disused gravel pit. A later edition of the six-inch map, published in 1923, shows the same small feature without the label, which may explain how a working quarry gradually drifted into the archaeological record under a more dignified category. When someone visited the site in November 2000 to assess what was actually there, they found that the scarp, the sloped edge left behind when the gravel was extracted, had been incorporated into a garden flower bed. The archaeology, such as it ever was, had become a border for plants.

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