Road - road/trackway, Cahirguillamore, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Roads & Tracks
A road that appears on no historical map, yet runs for over two hundred metres through a Limerick field before splitting into two branches, is a quiet puzzle in the landscape of Cahirguillamore.
It does not show up on the Ordnance Survey's historic mapping, yet it is plainly visible from the air as a cropmark, that is, a trace left in growing vegetation where buried features alter how soil drains and plants grow. Earthen banks define either side of a track roughly ten metres wide, which runs southward for 220 metres before forking, one branch heading southeast for about 100 metres, another turning west for 120 metres. The fork suggests purpose and planning, a route going somewhere specific, though exactly where and when remain open questions.
The ground here carries considerable historical weight. The trackway sits within the southern part of a medieval field system, inside what was once a deserted medieval settlement. A medieval house lies roughly 45 metres to the west, and a castle site sits about 250 metres to the east. More recently, this was all deer park, part of the demesne attached to Cahir Guillamore House. The road was first formally identified by archaeologists Seán P. Ó Ríordáin and John Hunt in 1942, who noted that a number of roads were visible both on aerial photographs and on the ground itself. Their observation placed the feature on the archaeological record, though it never made it onto the standard cartographic one. A Digital Globe orthoimage taken in March 2017 confirmed the outline remains clearly legible from above.
The site sits in pasture on private land, so access would require landowner permission, and there is nothing to signal it from a road or footpath. The cropmark is best appreciated through aerial or satellite imagery rather than on foot, where the low earthen banks might be easy to walk past without recognising their significance. Online mapping tools that allow comparison of recent satellite images with historical aerial photography give the clearest sense of the branching layout. Late spring or early summer, when differential growth in grass or crops tends to make cropmarks most pronounced, would offer the best conditions for spotting it remotely. The surrounding cluster of medieval features, the field system, the settlement remains, the castle, reward careful attention to the broader landscape rather than a search for any single dramatic monument.