Quarry, Looscaun, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Mining
On old Ordnance Survey maps, hachures, those small radiating lines used to suggest slopes and earthworks, can mark anything from an ancient ringfort to a spoil heap, and they rarely come with an explanation.
When a hachured feature appeared on the 1948 revision of the six-inch OS map at Looscaun in County Galway, it was easy to read it as something older, something worth investigating. When someone finally went to look in 1983, they found a rectangular hollow quietly filling with trees on the north-facing slope of a low hillock, surrounded by undulating grassland. The most straightforward interpretation is a disused sand or gravel quarry, the kind of small extraction site that once supplied local building and agricultural needs and was then simply abandoned and forgotten.
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