Quarry, Inishloe, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Mining

Quarry, Inishloe, Co. Clare

On a six-inch Ordnance Survey map from 1922, a modest linear feature stretching roughly 23 metres in a north-west to south-east direction on Inishloe in County Clare was recorded without much ceremony.

Decades later, that same mark was formally catalogued as an earthwork, first in the Sites and Monuments Record in 1992 and again in the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996. It was not until an inspection in 2002 that the feature was identified for what it actually is: a quarry.

The reclassification is a small but telling illustration of how archaeological and heritage records evolve. Early mapping and desk-based assessments sometimes assigned provisional categories to features that had not been examined on the ground, and earthwork was a reasonable guess for a linear depression of that scale. Quarries, which could range from large industrial extractions to modest local workings cut to supply stone for field walls or buildings nearby, do not always announce themselves obviously in the landscape, particularly once vegetation has had time to soften their edges. The Inishloe site, wherever it sits within that range, quietly waited out the better part of a century before anyone looked closely enough to correct the record.

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