Quarry, Moorfield, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Mining

Quarry, Moorfield, Co. Galway

On a west-facing slope of a small hillock in the pastureland of Moorfield, County Galway, there is a slight hollow in the ground that once puzzled map-readers enough to mark it down.

On the 1944 to 1945 revision of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the feature appears as a series of dots, a cartographic notation that suggested something purposeful had once happened there. When someone finally went to look in 1984, the dots resolved into nothing more dramatic than a gentle depression, the land having largely recovered whatever shape it originally held.

The most plausible explanation, drawn from the map evidence itself, is that this was a quarry, the kind of small working that would have been common across rural Ireland in the post-medieval period, extracting stone for field walls, farmbuildings, or road repairs from whatever useful outcrop presented itself locally. Because the site dates to after AD 1700, it falls outside the chronological scope of bodies concerned with prehistoric and early historic remains, which tend to draw the line at that century. The result is a feature that is too recent to be archaeology in the formal sense, yet old enough to have faded from living memory and left only a faint mark on the ground and a cluster of dots on a mid-twentieth-century map.

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Pete F
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