Road - road/trackway, Coarha Beg, Co. Kerry

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Roads & Tracks

Road – road/trackway, Coarha Beg, Co. Kerry

Beneath the blanket bog of Valentia Island, between three quarters of a metre and a full metre below the living peat, a road is waiting.

It was not lost through neglect or catastrophe but simply swallowed, gradually, by the slow accumulation of centuries of decaying vegetation. It only became visible again when peat-cutters opened up an eight-metre-wide face in the Imlagh Basin at Coarha Beg, exposing a diagonal slice of small cobbles that once formed a deliberate, constructed surface for travel.

The trackway appears in two separate peat-cuttings roughly nine metres apart, which together give a clearer picture of its dimensions: the cross-section visible in the second cutting measures about sixty centimetres wide and thirty-five centimetres thick, a compact, purposeful construction rather than a casual scattering of stones. A peat sample taken from the same level as the feature was radiocarbon dated to 1720 plus or minus 80 years before present, placing its likely use somewhere in the early centuries of the first millennium AD, during what archaeologists broadly term the Early Medieval period in Ireland. The trackway sits close to St Brendan's Well, a holy well that carries its own long association with early Christian devotion on the island. Whether the road and the well were related in use is unknown, but the proximity is at least suggestive of an ancient routeway connecting places that mattered to the people who built it. The work of A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan, whose survey of the Iveragh Peninsula brought this feature to wider attention, situates it within a landscape that preserves an unusual density of early remains beneath its boggy surface.

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