Keady Quarries

The Department's description

Exterior description and setting

Dramatic mass concrete structures situated just below the crest of Keady Mountain which give the hill a silhouette comparable to the natural cliff of Binevinagh in the distance to the north west.

The main structure is a rough concrete cube which sits out of the hill like a Sphinx with three sloping fins pawlike in front. There are two small openings to one side on the front (west) elevation. This was constructed in five pours (15m) from the top of the three pours high fins (9m). Rusted steelwork connects the top of the fins. There are no openings to the sides. To the south are three concrete walls stepping down from the apex, once supports for chute now removed. To the north, the second major structure, a rectangular trough three pours high set into the hillside so that only the west face is exposed. Directly below are four fins two pours high supporting the blank box above. Further to the north are the remains of single storey office buildings with concrete block walls and rusting tin roofs. A wide flat area sits directly in front of the buildings and is covered in fine hard-core before natural slope of the hill is resumed. Above the objects is the main quarry worked 500 metres approximately back into the hill. On the crest of the hill above the quarry are the remains of an old burial ground and a stone circle.

Historical information

Originally a limestone quarry though the two original ‘pillars of limestone’ have now been worked out. A quarry is shown on the 1830 map though it is not mentioned in the Ordnance Survey Memoirs and must have been small. The concrete buildings on the site were constructed during World War II when limestone was still being quarried by R Wark and Sons of Castlerock. B Mullan and Sons bought the quarry in the late 1950s and it was used continually until 10 years ago as a ‘stone quarry’ for aggregates. At that time the buildings and equipment were dismantled. Some occasional extraction still takes place but this is hampered by the archaeological site above on the crest.

The site of the remains is described by the Ordnance Survey as: ‘Keady ruins and also (known as) the Temple. It consists of a large circle formed by a wall of stones which vary from two to six feet in length. The wall is six feet broad, two feet high at present and the circle 65 feet in diameter. Inside this circle is a smaller circle 16 feet in diameter’. Its Historic Monument Reference is LDY2:1.

Reference:

B B Mullan and Sons
Ordnance Survey Memoir Vol. 9

Criteria for listing: architectural interest

Not listed

Criteria for listing: historic interest

Not listed

Evaluation

A highly dramatic man-made intervention in the landscape which portrays the character and cubistic form striven for by the ‘new brutalist’ architectural movement of the 1950s, in a much more impressive setting than many of those buildings. Also of interest as a piece of Industrial Archaeology.