Quarry, Caherpeak, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Mining
At Caherpeak in County Galway, there is a site on the official record of monuments that no longer exists in any visible form.
What was once noted as a piece of disturbed, quarried limestone has since vanished entirely beneath the effects of field clearance, leaving not so much as a hollow or a scatter of worked stone to mark its former presence.
The site has had an unusual administrative life as well as a physical one. For years it was logged as an enclosure, the kind of classification typically applied to defined areas bounded by earthworks or walls, often associated with settlement or agriculture. It was not until details recorded in 1969 were revisited that the classification was corrected to quarry. The original description was spare but clear: a piece of disturbed, quarried limestone. Limestone quarrying of this kind was common across the Connacht landscape, where the stone was extracted for building, for field boundaries, and for burning in lime kilns to produce fertiliser. Whoever worked this particular outcrop left little behind, and what little remained has since been cleared away along with the rest of the field evidence in the surrounding area.
