Mourne Granite.

The quarrying of Mourne granite was once a very important industry in the Mourne area, many English streets were cobbled with this stone.There is a now abandoned quarry on the lower slopes of Slieve Donard above Newcastle which used an ingenious method of delivering its products to the sailing ship waiting in the harbour below. A narrow gauge railway track was laid between the quarry and the harbour, it had a passing loop in the middle, one bogie would be at the top and the other at the bottom, connected by a wire rope. When the bottom one was unloaded and the top one loaded the top one was let go and it pulled the bottom one up, presumably a brake of some kind was applied to avoid overrun.

The millennium stone (shown on the right) erected at Delamont Park between Downpatrick and Killyleagh in 2000 was cut from a quarry a little to the north of the one mentioned above. The erection of the stone was televised, it would have been interesting to see how this would have been achieved if only the technologies available to the builders of prehistoric megaliths had been used.

The stone was extracted from many small quarry's across the entire area of the mountains, the colour of the stone varied at different locations. The uses to which the stone was put were many, probably the major use was cobble stones for paving streets, kerb stones known locally as kriibben for edging the roads and of course in the construction of buildings.

On many farms in the area you will see gate posts made from a slab of granite, in some of the earlier farm buildings granite is used for steps to lofts and as heads over windows and doors. One little known use was millstones for grinding grain, these would have been laboriously hand carved with chisel and mallet after roughing out the shape with feathers and wedges. It seems highly probable that man was first motivated to work stone by his need to grind grain and indeed the making of saddle and later rotary querns may have been an industry long before recorded history.

To split a block of granite the stone man first cut a row of holes in the block using a hammer and chisel, he then inserted two feathers 'Strips of steel' into each of the holes, between the feathers in each hole he placed a wedge, driving the wedges between the feathers created enough pressure to split the block along the line of the holes, it is interesting to note that the wedge is considered by many as mans first machine.

Today there are no working quarry's in the Mournes, the glens and mountainsides are silent the clink of the stone mason's hammer and the chatter of men at work are long gone. The industry lives on albeit on a much reduced scale, The little town of Annalong nestling in the shadows of the Mournes still produce granite products, their raw materials coming from China and India. The feathers and wedges are now replaced by computer controlled machines with diamond tipped blades.