Quarry, Inishmurray, Co. Sligo

Co. Sligo |

Mining

Quarry, Inishmurray, Co. Sligo

On an island better known for its early medieval monastic ruins and pilgrimage stations, one of the more puzzling features is not ancient at all, or at least probably not.

At the summit of a ridge on Inishmurray, immediately west of the Trahanee enclosure, a large pit has been cut into the ground, roughly six metres wide and nearly two metres deep, with walls of freshly exposed subsoil that suggest relatively recent disturbance rather than centuries of weathering and settlement.

The pit was recorded during a systematic survey of Inishmurray's archaeological monuments carried out between 1997 and 1999, the results of which were published by Jerry O'Sullivan and Tomás Ó Carragáin in their 2008 volume on the island's archaeology. Their assessment was cautious: the feature resembles a small quarry pit, possibly dug to extract sand or gravel, but its origins remain uncertain. The freshness of the exposed subsoil pointed surveyors toward a modern or near-modern date, though no documentary evidence was cited to confirm who dug it or why. Inishmurray, lying off the Sligo coast and evacuated by its last permanent residents in 1948, has a relatively recent layer of history that sits alongside its far older monastic one, and mundane interventions in the landscape, a pit for building material, a hollow scraped out for practical necessity, can be just as difficult to explain as the island's stone cashels and altar slabs.

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