Quarry, Glashare, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Mining
At Glashare in County Kilkenny, a site once classified as an ancient enclosure turned out, on closer inspection, to be something considerably more mundane.
For nearly a decade it sat in the official record carrying the designation of an enclosure, a term typically applied to prehistoric or early medieval earthworks defined by banks, ditches, or walls, suggesting a site of potential archaeological significance. The reality was rather different.
The site was first recorded as an enclosure in the Sites and Monuments Record in 1987, and that classification was carried forward unchanged into the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996. It was only through physical inspection that the error came to light: the feature in question was a quarry, not an ancient monument at all. Such misclassifications are not as rare as one might expect. Early survey work often relied on aerial photographs, cartographic sources, or brief fieldwork visits, and the visual signature of a quarry cut into the landscape can, under certain conditions, resemble the profile of an enclosed earthwork.