Road - road/trackway, Baysrath, Co. Kilkenny

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Roads & Tracks

Road – road/trackway, Baysrath, Co. Kilkenny

Beneath a modern arterial road linking Kilcullen to Waterford, archaeologists found an older road going roughly the same direction.

Uncovered in Baysrath, County Kilkenny, the remnant is sixty metres of metalled path, a term meaning a surface deliberately laid with stone rather than simply worn into the earth. It is only about ten centimetres deep and up to 3.8 metres wide, constructed from small angular and sub-angular stones packed tightly into a single dense layer. Modest in scale, it is the kind of infrastructure that tends to go unnoticed in the broader sweep of early medieval Ireland, yet its very ordinariness is what makes it interesting.

Excavation took place in 2007, ahead of the N9/N10 road scheme, under licence number E3627. Running east to west, the path was accompanied by a U-shaped ditch running parallel along its northern edge, along with a scattering of pits and possible post-holes. A radiocarbon date obtained from a sample taken from the ditch placed its use somewhere between approximately AD 780 and 971, squarely within the early medieval period. The path did not end neatly within the excavation area; it continued beyond the limits in both directions, suggesting it was part of a longer route. Archaeologists have proposed that it may have connected the ecclesiastical complexes at Kilree, Sheepstown, and Knocktopher, three early Christian sites clustered within a few kilometres of one another in this part of south Kilkenny. If that interpretation holds, what was uncovered is a fragment of a network of paths that monks, pilgrims, and local communities once used to move between religious centres in the Nore valley.

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