Menlough Marble Quarry

Notes:

The marble beds at Menlough are a southerly continuation of the Anglingham strata. Until 1837, 1000 tons of black marble was quarried annually at Menlough and shipped in its raw state to London and New York. During the 1840s and 50s, Phineas Franklin of Liverpool leased the quarry. He praised his marble enthusiastically, declaring, ‘I have yet the pleasure of knowing that it retains the highest reputation for its purity from white specks, its jet colour, and the large sizes that can be obtained’. As of 1869, the largest block extracted at Menlough measured ten by five by one and a quarter feet. Depending on the extent of incoming orders, Franklin employed an average of 30 to 150 men.

In 1846, Phineas Franklin confirmed the presence of four distinct marble beds at Menlough, with a combined thickness of three feet five inches: the top bed was eight inches thick, the second bed measured one foot in thickness, the third bed was 15 inches thick and the bottom bed extended six inches thick. By the late 1860s, during Kinahan’s inspection of the quarry, only two extractable marble beds remained: one measuring 13 inches thick and the other 15 inches thick.

Excavation at Menlough was a multi-stage process, which Franklin described in some detail. The first step, known as ‘stripping’, involved blasting the limestone overburden to reveal the marble beds. The overburden, occurring in one- to two-foot-thick beds, limited the blast depth to the thickness of each bed, making the operation ‘tedious and expensive’. However, upon exposure, the layered marble lay ‘as even as a billiard table’. The waste rock was removed by cart for local road building and the construction of the quays in Galway. Next, joints between the marble blocks were traced, and holes were created within those joints using a mallet and chisel. Wedges were carefully driven into the holes until the blocks separated and released from their position. They were then removed from the quarry using strong ‘crabs’ [cranes]. They underwent ‘blocking’ and ‘dressing’ before being loaded onto boats for transport three miles down the lake to the docks for onward distribution. Some of the marble was transported to the Galway Marble Works, also operated by the Franklins, for fabrication.

The most significant output from the Menlough quarry was probably the black marble for Hamilton Palace, Scotland in the early 1840s. Franklin supplied blocks, measuring up to 16 feet in length, at a price of £1700 to the London Marble Works, who prepared a magnificent double staircase for Alexander Hamilton (1767-1852), 10th Duke of Hamilton. The base for the monument to Napoleon in Paris is also believed to be of Menlough black marble. The industrious Franklins even managed to successfully sell the Menlough marble in Carrara, to which the Armagh Guardian exclaimed, ‘as singular an event as sending coals to Newcastle, has occurred in the transmission, by Messrs. Franklin, of marble from Galway, to the world renowned regions of Carrara itself'. Various members of the Franklin family operated the Galway Marble Works until the 1870s, which would suggest their continued engagement in extraction activities at Menlough during this time.