Ancient Road, Lalistown, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Roads & Tracks

Ancient Road, Lalistown, Co. Westmeath

On every edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, a track climbing the southern slope of the Hill of Uisneach in County Westmeath is labelled, simply, 'Ancient Road'.

The label is not wrong, exactly, but it has encouraged a particular story about this embanked roadway that the physical evidence has struggled to support. Running roughly north for some 500 metres from the public road towards a large conjoined ringfort on the hilltop, the road is sunken into the hillside, flanked by low grassed-over banks of earth and stone, and in places measures up to six or eight metres wide. A single boulder sits in the middle of the track at one point, apparently left in place because whoever built the road thought it more trouble than it was worth to shift.

R. A. S. Macalister and R. L. Praeger, who investigated the Hill of Uisneach in 1928, were captivated by the road's apparent alignment with the summit enclosures above and proposed it as a ceremonial processional avenue, perhaps ancient enough to belong to a second building phase of the hilltop ringfort complex. When they cut a trench across a well-preserved section, they found a paved surface of small angular pebbles laid roughly 0.2 metres below the present ground level, with the road itself sitting about 0.6 metres lower than the surrounding field. The side walls were built with a row of stones set on edge as a footing, with field stones laid above, much as a vernacular dry-stone wall would be constructed. Local tradition, recorded by Macalister and Praeger, held that the road once continued south of the Lunestown demesne and eventually reached Streamstown, though no trace of any such extension appeared on the Ordnance maps. The carriage drive to Lunestown House runs for a short distance in exact alignment with it, suggesting the estate road may simply have been laid on top of an older course, while the gate lodge of Lunestown appears to sit directly over the line.

The processional interpretation was revisited by Rachel Schot in 2006, and she found it wanting. The roadway stops more than 40 metres short of the enclosure, with no identifiable entrance at the point where it would meet the perimeter. The banks that Macalister and Praeger read as a continuation of the road into the interior are, on closer inspection, the remains of a derelict field system. Schot argued that both the construction technique and the topographical evidence point instead to a medieval date, making this less a ceremonial approach to an ancient royal site and more a well-built farm or estate track that happened to climb a hill freighted with mythological significance. The name has stuck regardless, and the road remains on the map exactly as it always was, ascending the hill with quiet insistence toward an enclosure it may never quite have reached.

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