Field Visit
Date May 1980
Event ID 1121894
Category Recording
Type Field Visit
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1121894
Marble-quarry, Rubha na Carraig Géire, Iona (NM 268 217)
Marble is found in several places on Iona, the most extensive source being located on the SE coast about 350m NE of Rubha na Carraig Géire. Here a vertical band of forsterite tremolite-marble, having an average width of about 7m, extends inland from the foreshore for a distance of at least 100m. The stone is white in colour, streaked and mottled with yellowish-green serpentine. The visible remains, situated in a steep-sided gully with the main working-face on the W, evidently date from the most recent period of quarrying activity, early in the present century. They comprise machinery (including a producer-gas engine manufactured by Fielding and Platt, Gloucester, and a cutting-frame by G Anderson, Arbroath), a small rock-cut reservoir, a gunpowder store and a roughly-built quay which provided the only means of transporting equipment to and marble from the site (1).
At the head of the gully, some 120m N of the working-area, there are the remains of a round-angled dry-stone building measuring 12m N-S by 5m transversely over 0.9m walls, and having opposed doorways towards the S end of the side walls. This structure, known locally as Tobhta nan Sassunaich ('House of the Lowlanders') (2), was probably erected in the 1790's, in connection with the operations of the short-lived Iona Marble Company. A little to the SW there are the concrete footings of a metal hut erected as a quarryman's shelter early in the 20th century.
It is probable that the marble veins of Iona were sporadically worked from a very early date and the table of the high altar of the medieval abbey-church appears to have been made from this material. The earliest known reference to quarrying, however, occurs in an anonymous account of Iona, written in 1693, which states: 'In this Iland is marble enough Whereof the late Earle of Argyle caused polish a peice at London abundantly beautifull'. There was a further brief period of activity c. 1790 following a survey by the Swiss geologist, Rudolf Raspé, and the establishment of a company in which the 5th Duke of Argyll and the industrialist William Cadell were partners, with Raspé as adviser (3), but work was abandoned because of the difficulties of transport, and by 1794 the Company's storehouse in the village had been converted into a schoolroom. Nevertheless, a good deal of marble had evidently been quarried by this time, for when MacCulloch visited the site shortly before 1819 he reported that: 'nearly the whole of the bed has been long since removed. Portions of the walls, and those parts which were inaccessible to the quarry-men by reason of the sea, still remain to show what it has been'. Thereafter the quarry appears to have seen only occasional use until about 1907, when a final period of intensive activity began, continuing until shortly after the outbreak of the First World War (4).
RCAHMS 1982, visited May 1980.
1. For a detailed account of the quarry , see Viner, D J, The Iona Marble Quarry (1979), reprinted from Industrial Archaeology Review, 1 (1976) , 18-27.
2. Information from Mr D MacArthur, St Andrews.
3. Cf. the similar operation at Balephetrish, Tiree (Inventory of Argyll, 3, No. 378).
4. Geog. Coll., 2, 217, 219; Argyll MSS, Inveraray Castle, Cherry Park, letter from Raspe dated 6 August 1789; Carswell, J, The Prospector (1950), 238-9; Cregeen, Estate Instructions, 181-2; Stat. Acct., 14 (1795) , 184; Garnett, Tour, 1, 265-6; MacCulloch , Western Islands, 1, 17; Viner, op. cit.
