Quarry, Feaghmore Eighter, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Mining
In the planted woodland of Feaghmore Eighter, a shallow scar in the ground marks the site of a disused quarry, the kind of feature that cartographers noted but seldom explained.
On the 1944 to 1945 revision of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, it appears as a hachured marking, the fine radiating lines surveyors used to indicate a depression or earthwork. When someone finally went to look in 1984, the feature turned out to be nothing more ancient than a quarry, worked at some point after 1700 and long since abandoned to the trees.
The quarry's relatively recent origin places it just outside the scope of formal archaeological investigation, which in Ireland typically concerns itself with features predating AD 1700. That boundary is not arbitrary; it reflects the point at which the historical record becomes dense enough that standing structures and industrial remains are better understood through documentary sources than through excavation. A post-1700 quarry in County Galway would have supplied stone for local building work, field walls, or road construction during the period of agricultural improvement and land reorganisation that reshaped the Irish countryside across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. No further details about who worked it or what it supplied have been recorded.