Slieve Rushin is a place apart. From its 1,200ft summit, the view of the surrounding countryside is exhilarating.

From here its massif – imagined as an island – rises above a lowland green sea, its broad summit enabling and unifying rather than impeding communications between the surrounding small settlements strung around its base, their backs to the mountain.

Social and cultural connections here are strong; borders are less so.

To those unfamiliar with its charms, Slieve Rushin is located on an axis extending roughly between Kinawley and Derrylin in the North to Ballyconnell in the South.

Its eastern slopes drain down to the shore of Upper Lough Erne, whilst to the west it overlooks the Swanlinbar valley and beyond to Cuilcagh and Slieve Anierin.

About seven miles long by three miles wide, it is perhaps more recognisable to today’s casual observer by its industrial profile of windmills and quarries.

Yet, there is a great deal more to this place than meets the eye, and for a hoker and a poker like me, it’s a mountain that keeps giving.

I was drawn back to it with geologist John Kelly last winter to visit an abandoned millstone quarry below its summit above Bawnboy as part of a heritage project to repair the water wheel at Tully Mill near Florence Court.

We wondered if it might have been the source of our millstones.

Fascinated by its unusual location, and inspired by the skills involved in shaping and moving the heavy millstones, I approached Templeport Community Association in Bawnboy to ask if they would facilitate a community discussion to find out if any local stories were attached to it (https://tinyurl.com/msr8hrxf).

A few months later, I was roaming the lower slopes of Cuilcagh above Swanlinbar to check out some newly-discovered Neolithic monuments when my host, Jude McHugh, brought me to an abandoned millstone resting among erratic sandstone boulders, deposited there after the last Ice Age.

Looking back across the valley to Slieve Rushin, I pinpointed the quarry I had visited previously, and realised that it, and where we now stood, were at similar elevations.

It made geological sense – millstones are made from hard sandstone, and both Slieve Rushin and Cuilcagh have limestone at their base, and ortho quartz sandstone higher up.

The subsequent community discussion in Bawnboy was electric. More than 20 people attended, many with photographs and exciting stories about millstones they found on high ground and, of all places, in upland rivers.

Marie Howden related how her husband’s grandfather dragged an undamaged millstone from a stream near his farm in Mullaghlea, and how they had found a damaged one further across the mountain, whilst Owenie Doonan and Aidan Brady presented photographs of a broken millstone lying against a bank of the Owengar River in Doon.

Owenie later informed me of another broken stone in a nearby quarry in Tully.

Information was also shared about an abandoned millstone quarry at Gortahork above Ballyconnell: a later reading of the 1834 Ordnance Survey (OS) Memoirs confirmed it was “a freestone quarry where very good millstones are made and sold to buyers from the neighbouring counties and parishes at from 3 pounds to 5 pounds per pair”.

In the following weeks, more sites came to light on the eastern side of the mountain.

John Murray told me of a millstone in a neighbour’s garden near his homeplace in Barr townland above Derrylin, so I visited his brother, Martin and his wife, Angela who live there today.

Martin remembered a couple of broken millstones further up the hill, but subsequent land clearance had swept them away.

This was not the case, however, with their neighbour Brian Lee, whom Angela directed me to at his nearby farm in Stony Park.

Brian led me to a field surrounded by stone walls and ditches where a large, damaged millstone lay on its back.

He explained that over the last three generations, most of his fields had been mechanically cleared of sandstone boulders, but this millstone had been respectfully left untouched, presumably from the day its makers abandoned it after damaging its centre eye.

From the visit to the first quarry above Bawnboy, nine additional sites and nine damaged millstones of different sizes have been found in rivers and sandstone outcrops around the mountain.

Yet there were only about ten mills (OS Memoirs) in the area – not enough to warrant this level of production, so why were so many being produced?

Clearly, demand for millstones came from further afield, especially in the heyday of milling from the 1790s to the 1840s, so our rediscovered millstones had likely been made by mountain farmers supplementing their incomes in the decades before and after the OS survey over and above what was produced at the recognised Gortahork quarry.

The Tully Mill millstones could well have been made and transported from any of these sites during this period.

If, in our mind’s eye, we could journey back to the early Nineteenth Century we would see a very different place.

Freed of contemporary windmills, quarries and forestry plantations, the landscape was densely populated, with many poverty-stricken people living in stone and mud houses among countless small bank and ditched fields stretching 800ft up the mountainside (OS Memoirs).

The apocalyptic Famine years brought death, emigration and language loss. I suspect they drew down a veil of forgetting over the country, obliterating the cultural memory of this traditional craft from around the mountain.

Yet, tantalisingly, Jude McHugh offers a glimpse back to this time by recalling a story laden with pathos told to him by his father about nameless people who worked on the millstone on his land.

“After they damaged the nearly finished millstone, they lost hope and abandoned it, and in losing hope, they emigrated.”

The people of this upland Border country have always been inventive, hardworking, skilful, industrious and resilient.

With further research and community engagement, more information may come to light about this forgotten craft – and those who worked it – so that they, and the stone treasures they left behind, may be better remembered.

To see these millstones in the landscape where they were shaped, and sadly often abandoned, is an awe-inspiring and humbling experience, leaving one wondering at the necessity that drove them to do such work in such a demanding environment.

Clearly, contemporary local industrialists were not the first to successfully exploit this upland country, but did they know they were standing on the shoulders of giants?

Further research is needed to map abandoned millstones in the Slieve Rushin area. If you are aware about millstone quarries, please contact barneydevine@gmail.com.

A special thanks to Killesher Community Development Association; those who generously contributed to the Bawnboy workshop; landowners mentioned in this article; local people, Caroline Strong, Eddie Brogan, Jimmy McKiernan and Sheila McKernan; and local historians, Oliver Brady, Nigel Rofé, Isobel Duggan-Rofé and industrial historians Sebastian Graham and Fred Hamond.

Barney’s blog can be read at https://notes-from-the-field.blog.