Quarry, Kilmoraun, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Mining
A slight hollow in a field in Kilmoraun, County Clare, spent several decades on the official record as something it was not.
For years, the site was catalogued as an enclosure, the kind of classification that typically signals a ringfort or some other enclosed settlement of early medieval origin. In practice, it was an old gravel pit.
The confusion began with cartography. The 1922 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map showed hachuring in this area, the kind of shading used to indicate changes in ground level, and a researcher named Westropp had noted in 1917 a reference to a levelled fort somewhere nearby. Working from these two sources, compilers entered the site into the Sites and Monuments Record in 1992 and the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996, both times under the category of enclosure. The actual fort Westropp had mentioned turned out to be a separate, properly documented site elsewhere in the same townland. When the OS twenty-five inch map was consulted more carefully, the hachuring resolved into something far more mundane: a feature labelled "Gravel pit, disused". A site inspection carried out in 2000 found nothing more than a shallow depression in the ground, the faint trace left by an old quarry after decades of weathering and agricultural use.
The episode is a small, instructive example of how archaeological records accumulate errors. A historical reference, a cartographic mark, and an assumption about their relationship combined to produce a phantom enclosure that persisted in official databases for years. The site itself holds no particular archaeological interest, but its paper trail says something worth noticing about how carefully the past needs to be read.