The Mountains of Mourne - A Celebration of a Place Apart

The Millstones

More than 1750 feet up on the northern ridge of the Mournes, whenre the ground starts to rise to the summit of Slievenaglogh, lies a massive memorial to generations of men whose strength and toughness must have equalled that of the rock from which they wrested a hard, hard living.

One on the surface, cut from the living granite that here is exposed in horizontal slabs, but now almost buried by maybe a century of accumulating peat and heather, is a great pierced dic, a millstone, shaped by hand and chisel and then, mysteriously, abandoned, never to turn in the corn-mill for which it had been destined.

Six feet in diameter and the spindle hole cut through its centre showing it to be a foot thick, at the density of granite it weighs more than two tons, even carved almost to its finished shape to minimise its weight before the long haul by rope and slipe down the rough mountain slopes to a mill somewhere miles away.

Why did it never make that journey? Did death or change of fortune strike the man who daily climbed the hill to carve it or the moneyed one who ordered it to be made, or did new technology make the great stone redundant – as pre-cast concrete later sounded the death-knell of hand-shaped granite kerb-stones and lintels, hundreds of which also now lie, lichen-skinned, around the quarried hillsides, neatly stacked, waiting for the slipe that never came.

Four kilometres due east of Slievenaglogh, and much more accessible to road and ship, is a hill actually called Millstone, from which these vital items were sent to grind the harvested oats and barley in townlands around Ireland and across the water. Most were carved from quarried slabs but one stone cut from the granite on the surface still lies just below the summit. Smaller than the great stone on Glogh and just roughly shaped, it lies where it was cut in a circle from the parent rock with a precision that looks as if it could be replaced with the joint being hardly visible.

But polished Mourne granite was a valued item of trade and widely sought after for turning grain into flour from long before polished mills were built requiring great stones. Granite querns for hand grinding have been found many miles away at excavated settlement sites from long before the time of the Normans.

Some good advice to read before following in David Kirk’s footsteps in the Mournes: mountain walking advice, extracted from Walking Ireland’s Mountains: a guide to the ranges and the best walking routes by David Herman, published by Appletree Press.