There’s a famous story told about Daniel O’Connell and a man breaking stones by the roadside in 1829.

The Liberator was heading home to Derrynane in Kerry shortly after the passing of the Catholic Emancipation Act in the English House of Commons.

The stonebreaker enquired as to what way the change in the legislation might effect his life. O’Connell is supposed to have answered: ’Tis all the same to you, my good man, you’ll still be breaking stones.”

On Monday morning last, that little anecdote came to my mind as I made a little pile of stones by the roadside on the way from Bartlemy village to the School Cross.

In times past, a horse and butt load of red sandstone rock would be dumped on that very same spot a few times a year. Then, sitting on his súgán chair, the stone-breaker would take each sandstone piece in his hand and, using a tiny iron hammer, he’d reduce that rock to small fragments. These pieces would then be used to what they called ‘sheet the road’, then earthen sods placed on top, and - hey presto - that was the ‘new road’!

That was long before tarmacadam for roads came to be used widely. This old method was in place from the late 1700s right up until the early 1940s. The local Poor Law Guardians (forerunners of the County Councils) would each year look for ‘contractors’ to tender a price for different stretches of the road.

When the job was given to a road contractor, it was up to him then to maintain that road in good condition for the next year.

Here, locally, the stone was quarried in Killamurren, Cronovan, and Ballinwillin. It was back-breaking work, but if one got a good ‘vein’ of rock it was easier to prise it from the quarry face. Then it had to be transported to little........

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