Road - road/trackway, Raheennamadra, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Roads & Tracks
A road that never appeared on any Ordnance Survey map, threading through ordinary pastureland in County Limerick, is most visible not to the walking visitor but to a camera looking straight down from altitude.
This ancient trackway in Raheennamadra survives today as a cropmark, a phenomenon where buried features alter how grass or crops grow above them, leaving a faint but readable trace in aerial photographs that ground-level inspection would entirely miss. It is, in the most literal sense, a path you can only see from the sky.
The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp, writing in 1919, recorded this as one of two roads running eastward from an earthwork immediately to its west. Westropp was a meticulous documenter of Munster field monuments in the early twentieth century, and his note places this trackway within a cluster of associated features: the earthwork to the west, and a pair of conjoined ringforts, which are roughly circular enclosures defined by banks and ditches and typically associated with early medieval settlement, lying immediately to the north. A second parallel road runs some 50 metres to the southeast. The trackway sits just 30 metres east of the townland boundary with Mitchelstowndown North, close to the edge of what was evidently a well-organised early settlement landscape. Its full trace, running northeast to southwest for approximately 140 metres, became legible in Digital Globe imagery captured between 2011 and 2013, and was visible again in a Google Earth image dated 18 November 2018. Aerial photographs held by the Aerial Survey of Ireland, taken on 5 January 2003, also record the feature.
The site lies in private farmland, so access to the field itself is not a given, though the surrounding area can be explored with appropriate consideration. The cropmark is not visible at ground level and is unlikely to reward a casual visit without consulting the aerial images available through the Historic Environment Viewer or the relevant records in the Sites and Monuments Record for County Limerick. Those who do seek it out should look for the broader constellation of earthworks nearby, since the trackway only makes sense in that context, as a route connecting or serving the enclosures and structures that once occupied this quiet stretch of the Limerick countryside.