1st Lime Kiln Traditional Cache

This is in an area of outstanding natural beauty, with spectacular views of the islands of Rathlin, Islay, Ailsa Craig and the Mull of Kintyre. Congratulations Tarmac Cowboy for FTF. In 1842 the novelist William Thackeray described the scene: ‘As one travels up the mountains at night, the kilns may be seen lighted up in the lonely places, and flaring red in the darkness’.

The cache is a plastic pill box with room for only a log.  To open line up the lid arrow with the arrow on the silver tape.

             Many small lime kilns survive in the vicinity of Ballycastle and Murlough Bay, where coal was readily available. Coal had been mined at Ballycastle since the 1600s. During the 1800s and 1900s, many basalt and limestone quarries were opened up. Numerous lime kilns were also erected for the conversion of limestone into agricultural fertilizer and also mortar. The economic importance of coal should not be underestimated, fuelling as it did Britain’s eighteenth-century industrial revolution. Within the Glens of Antrim, coal seams were found immediately east of Ballycastle and also at Murlough Bay. At its zenith in the 1750s, more than a hundred miners worked at Ballycastle to produce 5,000-8,000 tons of coal annually, but by the mid-1800s most mines had been worked out. At Murlough Bay, mining took place sporadically from the late 1700s to the 1940s, but never on the same scale as Ballycastle. Dispatch was difficult, due to land slippage and the exposed shoreline. The remains of the houses of the mine workers are a visible reminder.