Quarry, Killeroran, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Mining
There is something quietly revealing about the way old maps mark the ground.
On the 1926 revision of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, a small subrectangular hachured feature appears in the meadowland at Killeroran in County Galway. Hachuring on maps of this kind typically indicates a depression or earthwork, the cartographer's way of noting that the ground does something unexpected. When the site was inspected in 1984, that cryptic marking turned out to correspond to a disused gravel pit, its outline still legible as a shallow hollow in the field.
The pit is thought to date from the nineteenth or early twentieth century, a period when local extraction of gravel and stone was common across rural Ireland for road maintenance, drainage work, and farm improvement. Such workings were rarely documented with any care, and many have since been absorbed back into the landscape, surviving only as slight dips in otherwise unremarkable fields. What makes this one worth noting is precisely that chain of record: a feature dug into the earth, mapped in 1926, identified from that map nearly sixty years later, and confirmed as what it actually was only by going and looking.