Quarry, Woodbrook, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Mining
On the 1931 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, a small hachured mark sits quietly in rough pastureland at Woodbrook in County Galway.
Hachures, the short radiating lines cartographers used to indicate a depression or slope, were the standard way of flagging something worth noting on the ground, even when that something was modest. When the site was inspected in 1984, the mark turned out to correspond to a disused gravel pit, now little more than a hollow in the grass, most likely dug sometime during the nineteenth or early twentieth century. About 45 metres to the north-east, in the same field, a second hollow sits in almost identical circumstances. Two pits, two faint scars in the pasture, separated by a short walk and possibly by years or decades of use.