Tiree, Balephetrish Marble Quarry

This small quarry is situated at the foot of Balephetrish Hill, about 75 m SE of the steading of Balephetrish farm. A vein of pink marble which outcrops at this point has been quarried from an area measuring approximately 17.5 m in length from W to E by about 14.5 m in width. The worked E face is about 3.5 m in height, and impressions on the rock face indicate that blocks varying in length from 0.9 m to 2.1 m have been extracted from the quarry. The lower level of the S face bears a series of wedge-marks spaced at 0.9 m centres.

The occurrence of marble on Tiree was first recorded in 1764 by Dr John Walker, and thereafter blocks of marble were quarried at Balephetrish and transported to Edinburgh and Inveraray, some of it being fashioned for ornamental use. In 1789 Rudolf Erich Raspe, a Swiss geologist, prepared a report on the quarry for the 5th Duke of Argyll, and by 1791 marble-quarrying activities had been formally incorporated in a commercial company to which Raspe acted as principal adviser. The company was beset by problems of transport and finance, and ceased operations after only three years. A later visitor to the abandoned workings censured the methods of quarrying employed by this company, and suggested that the quarry had been 'managed apparently by workmen ignorant of the use of the feather wedge or other modes of raising unstratified rocks. About half of it seems to remain untouched; but much even of that is split by the mines used in detaching the blocks which have been quarried'. Large blocks of marble were still lying at the quarry in 1843.

RCAHMS 1980, visited June 1974