Road - road/trackway, Cashel, Co. Laois
Co. Laois |
Roads & Tracks
A quiet laneway in County Laois follows a route that is considerably older than it looks.
What appears to be an ordinary field track is in fact the surviving trace of an old road that once ran between Castletown and Borris-in-Ossory, two settlements in the midland landscape of Laois. The road did not take an arbitrary line; it passed midway between two ancient monuments, a caiseal and a site known as Brandybush fort, a positioning that suggests the route was plotted in deliberate relation to landmarks already present in the landscape.
A caiseal is a stone ringfort, a roughly circular enclosure built from dry-stone walling rather than an earthen bank, and the one here sits alongside a second fortified site referred to in local tradition as Brandybush fort. The historian William Carrigan noted the road's course in his 1905 county history, placing the trackway between these two monuments. That a nineteenth-century historian was recording it as an older road, and that its outline remains legible today as a laneway, points to a route with some persistence, one that served traffic moving through this part of Laois across a long stretch of time before the modern road network made it redundant.