strange sand river bank after floods

stylie

Hi,

Can anyone identify this ?

Its from the Blackwater River, Munster and became exposed after the winter floods. Looks almost like tarmac when you approach it but its sand. Appears to go black exposed to air, and breaks apart when you walk on it, actually pretty dangerous to step on.

slowburner

At a guess, it looks as though the sand is heavily mineralised and the exposed upper layer is oxidised. Was there any iron working in the vicinity - a mill or some such?
Whereabouts on the Blackwater?

stylie

Lombardstown above Mallow. I would say the sand was exposed after about 5-6ft of bank was eroded off the top of it. 2-3ft of top soil and 2-3ft of heavy gravel. I think it might be a few hundred yards long but I have to check the top of the section but I have a feeling it goes up that far. Quite strange but I suppose a mill or iron works upstream in the last few hundred yrs could have laid it down and floods covered it up.

GetWithIt

Looks a lot of Lime Kilns were in the area.

http://maps.osi.ie/publicviewer/#V1,546352,597744,4,9

Select Historic Layers and toggle everything on.

stylie

Certainly was a lot of them. So are we seeing a waste product of that process that was dumped into the river covered up and re-exposed or the river is eroding an area that was used to dump the waste material. Because looking at the bank it looks like the river deposited onto it and now is eroding it. I will take some more pics over the weekend if I'm fishing that section.