Quarry, Aghrane, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Mining
In the woodland at Aghrane, a hollow in the ground marks the site of a disused quarry, quiet enough that it took a cartographic clue to bring it to anyone's attention.
A hachured feature on the 1926 revision of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, those small radiating lines used by surveyors to indicate a depression or earthwork, prompted an inspection in 1984, which confirmed the hollow as the remains of a quarry, likely worked during the nineteenth or early twentieth century.
The quarry itself is modest in the archaeological record, defined primarily by the depression it left behind rather than by any surviving structure or documented history. What gives it a quiet interest is that a second, similar hollow lies a short distance to the west, suggesting that stone extraction in this part of County Galway was not a single isolated effort but part of a broader pattern of small-scale local quarrying, the kind that supplied building material for farms, roads, and walls across rural Ireland during that period. Neither hollow has been precisely dated, and the working lives of such sites were rarely written down.