Road - road/trackway, Ballyhomulta, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Roads & Tracks
Roughly three to four metres wide and edged on both sides by large boulders, an old road winds through the townland of Ballyhomulta in County Clare, tracing a course that a modern tarmac road now runs beside, almost in its shadow.
The ancient route meanders north to south for around two hundred metres before quietly dissolving into the landscape, its final stretch possibly absorbed by a natural gryke, one of the long, narrow fissures that split the Burren's limestone pavements. The fact that it simply stops, with no dramatic terminus, is part of what makes it interesting.
The road sits within a large, multi-period field system, meaning the surrounding landscape was shaped and reshaped by different communities across a considerable span of time, though no single date has been confirmed for the trackway itself. It is not alone in this terrain. A house of indeterminate date was built directly along its western edge, suggesting the road was already a fixed reference point when whoever raised those walls made their calculations. Around forty-four metres to the east lies a cashel, a type of stone-walled ringfort common across early medieval Ireland, and an enclosure sits just fifteen metres away on the same side. The road does not merely run past these structures; it seems to have organised itself around them, or they around it. To the northwest, across the boundary into the neighbouring townland of Ballykinvarga, a similarly meandering roadway passes close by two further cashels, and it may well represent the same route continuing under a different name on a different parcel of ground.