Quarry, Friarstown North, Co. Limerick

Co. Limerick |

Mining

Quarry, Friarstown North, Co. Limerick

On a south-facing slope in the rolling pasture of Friarstown North, there is a feature that was once recorded as something it almost certainly is not.

A curving bank of stones, rising about 0.7 metres on its inner face and barely visible above ground on its outer edge, gave early surveyors reason to wonder whether they were looking at the remnants of a cashel, the dry-stone ringfort enclosures common across Munster from the early medieval period. A closer reading of the landscape, however, tells a different story.

The curved bank, running from north to east around a central depression thick with scrub, turns out to be upcast, the material thrown aside during quarrying, rather than the deliberate construction of an enclosure. Upcast is the term for spoil dug or blasted free and piled at the edges of an excavation, and here it has mimicked the profile of something far older. Researcher Caimin O'Brien, who compiled the site record uploaded in March 2020, concluded that the area was quarried extensively, most likely after 1700, and that the curvilinear bank is a product of that industrial activity rather than evidence of early settlement. The Ordnance Survey 25-inch map, produced in the late nineteenth century, supports this reading by depicting the location simply as an area of rock outcrop, with no suggestion of an ancient monument.

The site sits in ordinary farmland with open views to the south, west, and east, but reaching the feature itself is not straightforward. Fallen trees, dense scrub, and a considerable scatter of large stones and boulders make the ground difficult to read and harder to move through. The depression at the centre, where quarrying appears to have been most active, is largely hidden beneath vegetation. For anyone with a particular interest in how landscapes get misread and reclassified, this unremarkable corner of County Limerick offers a quiet lesson in the difference between what a place looks like and what it actually was.

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Pete F
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