Quarry, Commons, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Mining

Quarry, Commons, Co. Clare

On an expanse of open karst in County Clare, roughly three metres from a large glacial erratic, lies a headstone that never made it to a grave.

Nearly two metres long and with one end carefully rounded, its upper surface has been worked to a perfectly smooth finish, yet it carries no name, no date, no inscription of any kind. The stone was abandoned mid-manufacture, its sides still roughly finished, its back uneven and pocked with solution holes where the natural limestone had dissolved over millennia. Karst, the bare fractured limestone pavement so characteristic of the Burren region, turns out to have been not just a landscape feature but a raw material, with suitable slabs worked in place before being transported to churchyards elsewhere.

The stone was recorded in 1996 as a grave-slab, though what it really represents is a snapshot of a craft industry caught at an incomplete stage. In 1986, a researcher named Coffey noted what appeared to be indecipherable lettering on the surface, which would suggest that inscription work had at least been attempted before the project was abandoned, though nothing legible has since been confirmed. The dimensions, 1.94 metres in length and around 0.63 metres wide, are consistent with a full adult headstone, and the broken corners at one end hint at some accident or flaw that may have brought the work to a halt. Similar quarrying locations, where headstones and grave-slabs were cut directly from the limestone pavement during the eighteenth century, are known from sites further north in Clare, suggesting this was a recognised local practice rather than an isolated curiosity.

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Pete F
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