Quarry, Stowlin, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Mining
There is something quietly telling about a feature that appears on a map, earns a hachured marking suggesting some kind of earthwork or enclosure, and then turns out, on closer inspection, to be a working sand pit.
On the north face of a small hillock in the grassland at Stowlin, that is precisely what happened.
When surveyors returned to this spot in 1984 to investigate a feature that had been recorded on the 1944 to 1945 revision of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, they found no ancient enclosure or archaeological remnant. The hachures, a cartographic convention used to indicate slopes or disturbed ground, had marked what was simply a sand pit, and one still being actively worked at the time of inspection. Because the feature dated to after 1700, it fell outside the scope of archaeological classification, and that was more or less the end of the matter.