Field Visit

Date May 1973

Event ID 674885

Category Recording

Type Field Visit

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/674885

NM74SW 1 725 418 and 712 422.

Outcrops of sandstone suitable for building purposes occur among the Carboniferous rocks that lie along the shore of Inninmore Bay, about 4 km SE of the mouth of Loch Aline. Two main working-areas are now recognizable, of which the first lies about 350 m W of Inninmore Cottage where a bed of coarse-grained sandstone some 50 m in length outcrops along the foreshore immediately above high-water level. This outcrop, which varies in colour from white to yellow, clearly served as a source both for millstones and tombstones. Several scars made by millstone-quarrying can be seen in the exposed rock-face, together with a number of unfinished millstones. In the same area there lie two roughly shaped blocks evidently intended for headstones, and a single finished headstone with a shaped top bearing the incomplete and poorly carved inscription HERE LAYS THE / REMAINS OF / D M P. The shape of the stone and style of lettering indicate a date about the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries.

The main quarry-area evidently lay a little further to the W beyond Quarry Burn, where beds of buff-coloured fine-grained sandstone up to 9 m in thickness can be seen outcropping along the foreshore for a distance of about100 m. Immediately above the foreshore three fair-sized quarries, with associated spoil-heaps, extend into the hillside, while close by there may be seen the remains of two oblong dry-stone buildings which may have been quarriers' houses. Stone was evidently transported directly from the site by sea, loading being carried out at a massively constructed boulder jetty of which considerable fragments remain. These quarries, with others in the Triassic deposits round the shores of Loch Aline, were probably worked as early as the 13th century, and provided freestone dressings for many of the major medieval and later buildings of the area (1). Operations appear to have ceased some time during the second half of the 19th century (2).

RCAHMS 1980, visited May 1973

Endnotes

(1) Cf. [RCAHMS 1980] Nos. 267, 293, 332, 343, 345, 349 and Inventory of Argyll, ii [RCAHMS 1975], Nos. 217, 267, 282, 285, 287, 292, 305, 357.

(2) Lee and Bailey, Pre-Tertiary Geology, 56-8, 66, 125; Macgregor, M and Manson, W, 'The Carboniferous Rocks of Inninmore, Morvern', in Summary of Progress of the Geological Survey of Great Britain...for the Year I933, part ii (1934),74-84; Stat. Acct. x (1794), 276; NSA, vii (Argyll),170-1; Gaskell, Morvern, 171.