Quarry, Kilquain, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Mining
In the pastureland of Kilquain, a feature on an old map turned out to be rather less mysterious than it looked.
On the 1944 to 1945 revision of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, a hachured marking, the kind of hatched symbol cartographers used to indicate a depression or earthwork in the landscape, caught enough attention to warrant a closer look. When someone finally went out to inspect it in 1984, the feature resolved itself into a disused quarry, almost certainly used for extracting stone in the post-medieval period.
Because the quarry dates to after AD 1700, it falls outside the scope of formal archaeological classification in Ireland, which tends to focus on earlier remains. That boundary is not arbitrary; it reflects a dividing line between sites considered prehistoric or early historic and those belonging to the more recent, better-documented agricultural and industrial past. Quarries like this one were once commonplace across rural Ireland, dug to supply local building projects with limestone or other workable stone, then abandoned when the need passed or the material ran out. Without a specific record of who worked it or what it supplied, this one sits quietly in the field, its origin unremarkable and its story unrecorded.