Road - road/trackway, Ballyganner, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Roads & Tracks
At Ballyganner in County Clare, a stone-lined trackway about 213 metres long threads its way between two clusters of abandoned houses, forking near its eastern end as though the people who used it could never quite agree on the best way home.
It is the kind of feature that modern roads erase without ceremony, yet here it survives, its edges still defined by carefully placed stones, the whole thing curving in the unhurried, irregular way that old paths tend to when they were laid down by foot traffic rather than surveyed by engineers.
The trackway belongs to a broader settlement cluster at Ballyganner, connecting two distinct groups of houses: three to the north-east and four to the south-west. It picks up from just east of one of the south-western houses, bends north-east in a loose arc, then swings east before dividing. One branch carries on eastward; the other turns south to meet the north-eastern house group. The 1920 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map records part of it, which places the trackway within living memory of that survey, though the settlement it served had almost certainly been declining well before then. Stone-lined tracks of this kind were a practical rural technology, the edging stones serving to keep cart wheels and livestock from drifting onto adjacent land or into soft ground at the verge.