“Dear Rebecca and Campbell
I would like to thank you most sincerely for your welcome to our geology group on Saturday, I think you will have seen how impressed everyone was with what you are doing to the castle: it is hard to recognise the lifeless shell I remember from my first visit 30 (or is it 40?) years ago.
It is always a wonder to me to see those walls rise straight out of the Clonony marble, held in such high repute by stone masons in the early 19thcentury: a vertical extension of its character. I am so glad one of the county's most important geological sites is in the caring hands of the castle's custodians. The quarry as such has more or less disappeared, but we still have that fine cliffed exposure in front of the castle, and the karstified outcrop on which the castle itself stands. Have you noticed the lovely orthoconic nautiloid on the left hand side of the entrance as you ascend to the castle? (these were shelled cephalopods, distant ancestors of modern squids and octopuses, which have more or less dispensed with shells). I have taken the liberty of tagging on a picture that will help you recognise what you are looking at in the stone. The seas in which your specimen swam once upon a time were Lower Carboniferous in age, so it would be celebrating its somewhere around 340 millionth birthday!
Yours sincerely
John Feehan
Offaly Naturalist's Field Club”