Everything is written in stone

Una D'Arcy

If it is not grown, it is mined, said geologist Robert Meehan, as he started an extraordinary story stretching back 360 million years.

Robert was the highlight of Heritage Week in north Westmeath, giving an outdoor talk exploring the natural, built, and cultural landscape of the award-winning monastic valley of Fore.

It was a steep hike to the face of Carraig Bhaile Fhobhair to join Robert and hear his fascinating description of how the handsome limestone influenced the built heritage of the monastic valley and the cultural heritage of the Seven Wonders.

His story began 330 million years ago with a shallow tropical sea teeming with life such as enormous dragonflies, giant scorpions, spiders, and snails. It was in these warm marine waters that the minerals were created that eventually became the rock we leaned against to listen to Robert.

The Mesolithic Quarry at Knockeyon

Even though we were all there to hear about Fore, we learned about a precious site on a neighbouring hill; the ancient chert quarry on top of Knockeyon.

Exposed semi-circular shaped cliff-faces of limestone and chert, which are not the result of a natural action, are believed to be the site of a chert quarry dating from the Mesolithic period meaning that it dates all the way back to the first settlers in Ireland.

Ireland’s diverse geology and a range of rich mineral deposits like zinc and copper means that it is still a place where mining is and will continue to be important. The wealth of stone and minerals in Ireland lends itself a great deal to the way our society carries itself along. Robert explained that there are countries that do not have a wealth of stone, gravel and sand and need to import these materials to build. He also explained that if you did not grow the material, you are using it must have been mined and that people do not realise how much we rely on mined precious metal and minerals for mobile phones and computers.

Which Wonders did Robert unpack?

Fore has seven wonders; the water that runs uphill, the water that does not boil, the wood that does not burn, the lintel raised by prayers, the mill without a race, the monastery on the shaking sod and the anchorite in the stone.

Robert was not in Fore, he reassured those gathered, to burst any of the myths, but he did have a number of explanations.

The giant lintel that St Fechin raised with prayers is indeed a monster of a stone. Robert gave no opinion on how St Fechin got the stone in place, but he did suggest that the stone itself was unlikely to have been quarried and was more likely to have been on the landscape carried there by retreating ice.

The water in Fore, as the wonder suggests, does arrive from Lough Lene through ‘swallow holes’ that are a feature of limestone landscapes. It lines up with the story that St Fechin went down to the lake and split the limestone to drive the water uphill into Fore. PJ Reilly provided a timeline of 16 hours for the water to travel between the lake and where it arrives as springs, based on a water study carried out there, but Cllr Frank McDermott believed it to be closer to four hours as he remembers when the water dried up and people would clear the debris from the wires at the lake shore and it reappeared in this short time later.

The water that does not boil may be due to mineral impurities and the monastery on the shaking sod may have astonished people as they did not realise the stone was there and a solid foundation unlike the soft, surrounding bog that covers most of the area.

While his talk was on stone, it was also about the culture of the stories the rocks inspired and the critical importance of the role of clean water and the water systems uninterrupted by society's interaction with the earth and stone the water runs through.