Quarry, Rahins, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Mining
On the eastern slope of a small hillock in the marshy grassland of Rahins, there is a site that has, in the most complete sense possible, ceased to exist.
What was once recorded as a gravel pit is now occupied by a shed, leaving no surface trace whatsoever of the feature that cartographers once considered worth marking on a map.
The pit appeared on the 1932 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a hachured feature, a symbol used to indicate a hollow or excavated depression in the ground. The larger-scale OS 25-inch plan named it plainly as a "Gravel Pit (Disused)", suggesting it had already fallen out of use well before the mid-twentieth century. When the site was inspected in 1983, nothing remained. The ground had been built upon, and whatever shallow archaeology the pit might have preserved was obscured, if not lost entirely. Because the feature dated to after 1700, it fell outside the scope of formal archaeological investigation, placing it in that particular category of Irish landscape history: too recent to be ancient, too gone to be current.