Spectacular reclaimed quarry amphitheatre is ready to rock

Headline acts Jack L, Hudson Taylor, Celine Byrne, and Paul Brady will showcase their talents this summer in a spectacular outdoor theatre where an exhausted limestone quarry was once used as a public dump.

Discovered by members of a mountaineering club, a more unlikely place for outdoor activities could hardly have been imagined.

Now, a premier cultural attraction in Co Kilkenny, the magnificent Ballykeeffe Amphitheatre had been abandoned by the local authority as a source for road metalling materials and later morphed into a dump for old cars, rotting furniture, and household waste, while becoming a winter storage point for beet supplies to a sugar factory.