Quarry, Clorane, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Mining
What appears on satellite imagery as a neat, tree-fringed rectangle of water sitting in reclaimed pasture near the Camoge River is, on closer inspection, a flooded void.
The ground was cut away here and then, eventually, the water moved in, leaving behind a geometry too regular to be natural and too quiet to draw much attention.
The site sits in County Limerick, roughly 170 metres south-west of the Camoge River, on the townland boundary between Clorane and Rathmore South. Clorane House lies just 160 metres to the south-west. The 1840 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map records nothing unusual at this location, but by the time the 25-inch edition was produced in 1897, the feature had been annotated as a disused quarry. That later map shows a rectangular cut measuring approximately 51 metres on its north-west to south-east axis and 35 metres across, with a cliff-face indicated along the southern, western, and northern edges, suggesting that material was extracted from three sides. Quarrying of this kind, typically for limestone used in construction or land improvement, was common on Irish estates during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the proximity to Clorane House hints at a straightforward domestic origin, though no documentary record is referenced in the survey notes to confirm the connection directly. By the time aerial orthophotography was compiled between 2005 and 2012, the cut had filled with water entirely, and a Google Earth image from February 2020 shows the same flooded, tree-lined outline still clearly legible from above.
The quarry lies in working agricultural land, so access would depend on landowner permission. There is no formal path or designation. The rectangular shape is most legible from above, which is why the aerial record has become its primary document; at ground level, the tree cover around the rim is likely the most visible indicator of the site. Anyone with an interest in estate landscapes or in the industrial vernacular of rural Ireland might find it worth cross-referencing against the OSi historical map layers, where the 1897 annotation preserves the moment before the water obscured what had once been an active, if modest, working face.