Road - road/trackway, Staigue, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Roads & Tracks
Most roads to ancient monuments get upgraded or bypassed; this one quietly split in two and kept going.
The valley track leading up from Castlecove to Staigue Fort in County Kerry has a working section that still carries visitors towards one of Ireland's finest dry-stone ring forts, and a second, older strand that fell out of regular use long ago and has since been absorbed into long-distance walking routes. That a road can have a disused twin, running parallel through the same upland landscape, gives this corner of the Iveragh Peninsula an unusually layered quality.
The travel writer Richard Hayward, passing through in the mid-twentieth century, described turning off at the Staigue Fort Hotel in Castlecove and following a rough, humpy road for roughly three miles into the mountains. He also noted a further section of old road out of Staigue that had been disused for many a year by the time he encountered it. Local knowledge holds that this older route crosses a hump-backed, stone-built bridge with two segmental arches and low parapet walls, situated about 1.5 kilometres south of the fort itself. When a road was first laid along this line is not recorded. The old section has since found a new purpose as part of the Kerry Way, a long-distance walking route that heads north-east from Staigue for around twelve kilometres to Sneem before continuing further east.
Walkers on the Kerry Way will pass over that two-arched stone bridge without necessarily knowing it carries the memory of a road that Hayward found already half-forgotten. The segmental arches, each a shallow curve rather than a full semicircle, are a common form in small Irish road bridges, built to keep the roadbed low and the crossing gentle. The fort itself sits further up the valley, but the road and its old parallel course are a quieter thing to notice along the way.