Ballyknockan quarry, or more correctly Ballyknockan quarries, are a collection of disused granite quarries in the village of Ballyknockan, County Wicklow, Ireland. From the early 19th century onward, the site was "probably the most important area for supplying cut stone blocks of granite for the construction of many of Dublin city's major public buildings", according to a report by the Geological Survey of Ireland. At its height, from approximately the 1840s to 1870s, there would have been "hundreds of workers" active in various trades in the quarries, which lie some 15 miles south-west of Dublin city. Transportation of the materials alone to the city by horse and cart required considerable logistical effort.
According to most sources, the quarries were founded in the year 1824. The Ballyknockan community celebrated the bicentennial of the founding of the quarries in 2024 with the opening of a new museum. Granite is no longer quarried onsite, but the mountainsides are still "littered with stray chunks of granite" which stonemasons use to produce monumental orders, as well as using stockpiled and locally imported stone.
The village of Ballyknockan was largely built with granite from the quarries, and became known as Wicklow's "Granite Village", or "the Rockery of the Garden of Ireland". Extant stone buildings in the village today demonstrate the skills of the stonemasons who built them.
Background The granite in the Wicklow Mountains, wherein Ballyknockan sits, is of Devonian age dating to around 400 million years ago and is part of what is known as the 'Leinster granite batholith' which stretches from Killiney Hill in Dublin southwards to County Carlow. Granite has also been exploited on the island of Ireland in counties Galway, Donegal and Down. According to Patrick Wyse Jackson, curator of the Geological Museum in Trinity College, close examination of Ballknockan granite reveals its constituent minerals, which include: "...pale, glassy quartz, milky feldspars, and black and silvery micas. The Ballyknockan variety is medium- to coarse-grained, with interlocking crystals some three to four millimetres in size. Apart from the minerals mentioned above, the granite also contains some chlorite".
The wider Dublin area was exploited for its granite long before the 1820s when the Ballyknockan quarries were established, and it is known that granite quarrying took place at Dalkey quarry, close to Dublin city, from 1680. Granite was commonly known as "firestone" until the late eighteenth century; not from its classification as an igneous rock (which at this stage was still unknown), but rather from its initial usage as a material from which to make fire grates and chimney pieces owing to its heat-resistant properties.
Prior to 1720, calp limestone was the main stone building material used in Dublin, and was quarried locally in the suburbs of Palmerstown, Kimmage, Rathgar and Donnybrook (where a Dublin Bus depot has existed since 1952). After this date, imported limestones, sandstones and granites began to replace the calp as they became more popular. The nearest granite sources to Dublin were the quarries of south County Dublin and north-west County Wicklow, which, however close, still required the costly and labour-intensive transport of stone to the city, especially when via overland haulage (as was the only option for Ballyknockan haulers).
The operation of moving the materials to the building sites of Dublin required raising large blocks of hewn stone (in blocks of up to a quarter-ton) onto a wooden blockwheel cart (aka the 'Irish carr') using hand-powered lifting tackle. According to Hussey, the Irish carr was "the standard transport vehicle used in Ireland until the early nineteenth century".
The eighteenth century, "probably Dublin's most prosperous period" according to Wyse Jackson, saw the erection of many of Dublin's most important public buildings which were built of calp limestone rubble walls and "faced with either Leinster granite or Portland stone" imported from England. Granite from the Wicklow and Dublin Mountains, and limestone from the immediate hinterland, came to be the primary stones used in the construction of Dublin city, and can be recognised as "characteristic to Dublin" in the same way that basalt from County Antrim and granite from the Mourne Mountains came to typify Belfast's urban landscape.
Local quarrying in the 1700s
According to Wyse Jackson and Caulfield, "Granite was reportedly first quarried in west Wicklow in the early 1700s from several openings at Baltyboys near Blessington, and from 1740 in more significant volumes at Woodend and Threecastles nearby and then from Golden Hill" near the village of Manor Kilbride.
According to Wyse Jackson and Caulfield, the ability to quarry granite in considerable volume was delayed in Ireland until the mid-1700s due to technological constraints.
Stones from the west Wicklow sources, especially Golden Hill, were used in the construction of many important Dublin buildings, including Parliament House on College Green, Daly's Club, the entrance to Trinity College Dublin, the Provost's House at Trinity College, the Royal College of Surgeons and the east side of Leinster House, all constructed in the 1700s.
A detailed map of the Blessington area produced by Jacob Neville in 1760 shows quarries at Golden Hill and Oldcourt, but no quarrying at Ballyknockan. At that stage there was not even a road to the village, although by 1771 it is known that a small community were living onsite in a clachan, or hamlet, as a list of occupying families exists for that year.
19th century Pre-1824 (Year of establishment) The un-dated County Geological Site Report by the Geological Survey of Ireland states that quarrying began in Ballyknockan in 1824, a date supported by other sources. Some other sources give an earlier date of 1820 as the starting year.
The decision to quarry at Ballyknockan began either as a result of the exhaustion of the granite quarry at Golden Hill, or as a result of the local landowner there not renewing the licence. In any case, a group of 400 men were led by a man with the surname of 'Olligan' (some sources also give the surname as 'Holligan', or 'Halligan') from the site near Manor Kilbride on an "exodus of near biblical proportions" to Ballyknockan, a journey of about 11 km as the crow flies (in a straight line over Lugnagun hill).
According to the Wicklow People, "Olligan and his workers made the move because the stone around Golden Hill in Kilbride was running out and awareness was growing of how fine the granite (was) up in the mountains". As explained in a local exhibition in 2018 focusing on the local stonecutting tradition: "Local oral history says that as it became apparent that the supply of stone in Oldcourt and Golden Hill was dwindling in the 1820s, Paul Duffy and Patrick Olligan came to prospect for a new site in Ballyknockan. The stone in Ballyknockan seemed superior to their supply in Golden Hill/Oldcourt and Ballyknockan had the added advantage of belonging to the same landlord as their sites in Kilbride, the Cobbe Family."
The main quarry at Ballyknockan came to be known as Olligan's (Note: As of 2015 it was trading as Creedon's). It is thought that until at least the late 1830s, many of the workers who had switched to working in Ballyknockan still lived in the Golden Hill area and walked the lengthy distance to Ballyknockan every day and back.
The new workers eventually constructed houses for themselves in Ballyknockan, which, according to O'Reilly, are "unusually well-constructed lime-mortared houses and outbuildings, made possible by the high quality of the local granite and the skills of the resident stone-cutters". Ballyknockan did not have a church of its own, and so the inhabitants were subsumed into the parish of Blackditches with its church at Valleymount.
While these dwellings were "often simple enough", according to historian Christiaan Corlett, "they frequently feature beautiful granite chimneys as well as formal barge stones at the gables". Corlett contends that most of the Ballyknockan roofs would have been weatherproofed using thatch, which was the most common form of roofing in County Wicklow until about the 1930s when galvanised sheets began to take over.
1824 to 1840s (Beginnings)
What has been described as a "second great wave of public building" began in Dublin in the second quarter of the 19th century, necessitating much granite from a local source. The Irish Times notes that the "first phase of large-scale quarrying began" at Ballyknockan in the 1820s.
Stone from Ballyknockan was used in the construction of parts of Trinity College Dublin in 1832, and beginning from about 1836, large granite slabs were used to line the sloped embankments (about 30 feet in height) of Brittas pond near Brittas, County Dublin in order to prevent water from escaping the floor and sides of the artificial lake.
Stone from Ballyknockan was used "extensively" in the building of Dublin churches in the 1830s, including St Francis Xavier's (1832), St Andrew's (1837), and St Paul's on Arran Quay (1837). A lesser known church building which demonstrates the Ballyknockan stonecutter's skill around the same time is St. Joseph's Church in Valleymount (close to Ballyknockan), which was built in a "Mexican" style in 1803, but with "a distinctive pinnacled front façade and porch added c.1835".
In 1838, surveyors from the Ordnance Survey of Ireland visited Ballyknockan in preparation for the creation of their first Ordnance Survey maps, and noted 160 men in the village working onsite across three quarries. They remarked of the quarry(ies): "...the best in this part of the kingdom, and has been in use for the last 14 years." The surveyors made note of just two roads running through Ballyknockan, both being of a poor standard. Between the 1830s and 1890s, mapping evidence shows considerable improvements made to these roadways, as was the case elsewhere in rural Ireland too.
In 1839, architect J. S. Mulvaney utilised Ballyknockan granite for the construction of Kingstown railway station (modern day Dún Laoghaire railway station) in Dublin.
1840s to 1870s (Peak production) The quarry reached its peak output during the period of the 1840s-1870s, according to information boards produced for a local exhibition in 2018 held in Valleymount community hall.
In 1840, one Christopher McEvoy started quarrying in Ballyknockan, but waited until 1865 to register the quarry, paying the sum of ten shillings to do so. Christopher had already served his time as a stonecutter at the quarry before taking it over from a man called Daniel Farrington, according to the Wicklow People, however it is not stated which exact quarry this refers to. As of 2015, descendants of the same Christopher McEvoy were still working onsite at Ballyknockan.
The area surrounding Ballyknockan was not as badly affected by the Great Irish Famine of 1845 to 1852 as other parts of Ireland, since the people were engaged in an employment economy rather than the subsistence economy prevalent elsewhere. Contrary to much of Ireland, the population actually grew during the period, from 351 inhabitants in 1841 to 430 in 1851.
Mary Immaculate, Refuge of Sinners Church in Rathmines, Dublin built between 1850 and 1856, was constructed using granite from Ballyknockan as well as calp limestone from quarries in Kimmage as well as Donnybrook.
By the time of Griffith's Valuation, which visited in 1852, there were four quarries, operated by the following men: Patrick Holligan (Olligan), (who subsequently died in 1853. The quarry was taken over by Patrick O'Reilly) Brian Hanlon (taken over by James Freeman in 1862) Patrick O'Reilly (taken over by Peter Bryan in 1862) John Brady