Road - road/trackway, Ballinagee, Co. Wicklow

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Roads & Tracks

Road – road/trackway, Ballinagee, Co. Wicklow

On a south-facing slope in the forested hills of Ballinagee in County Wicklow, a barely-there lane cuts through the trees.

It is not much to look at: a narrow, crudely defined track, in places marked by low earthen banks no more than thirty centimetres high and a metre wide. What makes it quietly remarkable is where it seems to go, and what that journey might once have meant.

The laneway appears to connect the entrance of a nearby ecclesiastical enclosure, the kind of circular or sub-circular boundary that once defined an early medieval monastic or religious site, to the route of St Kevin's Way roughly a hundred metres to the south. St Kevin's Way is an ancient pilgrimage road through the Wicklow uplands, traditionally associated with the saint who founded the monastery at Glendalough in the sixth century. If this modest track did indeed serve as a link between a religious settlement and that broader pilgrimage route, it would represent a small but telling piece of how people moved through, and made meaning of, this landscape in the early medieval period. The laneway was not found in any archive or recorded document; it was identified on the ground during a University College Dublin School of Archaeology research and teaching project conducted over three seasons between 2004 and 2006, led by work published by O'Sullivan and Warren across several years of that project.

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Pete F
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