Quarry, Curraghrevagh, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Mining

Quarry, Curraghrevagh, Co. Galway

In the rolling pastureland of Curraghrevagh, a slight hollow in the ground is almost all that remains of what was once a working gravel pit.

It is the kind of feature that most people would walk past without a second thought, yet it carries a small cartographic mystery at its core.

On the 1931 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the site appears marked with hachures, the short radiating lines that cartographers traditionally used to indicate a depression or earthwork of some kind. When the site was examined in 1984, that ambiguous marking resolved itself into something considerably more mundane: a disused gravel pit, its working life long over, leaving only a shallow hollow in the pasture. The pit is thought to date from the nineteenth or early twentieth century, a period when local extraction of gravel and aggregate was commonplace for road maintenance and farm improvement across rural Connacht. What makes it worth a moment's attention is precisely this gap between cartographic suggestion and ground-level reality, a reminder that old maps encode practical, workaday landscapes just as readily as ancient monuments.

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Pete F
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