Road - road/trackway, Boherygeela, Co. Limerick

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Roads & Tracks

Road – road/trackway, Boherygeela, Co. Limerick

A road that appears on no edition of the Ordnance Survey maps, yet stretches for a full kilometre across reclaimed pasture in County Limerick, is the kind of thing that tends to surface only when viewed from the air.

That is precisely how this trackway in the townland of Boherygeela came to wider attention: aerial photography revealed a long, straight linear feature running north to south, its outline preserved by the low banks and ditches, known as fosses, flanking either side. On the ground, the raised surface is still visible to a careful eye, though the landscape has long since been absorbed into ordinary farmland.

The townland name offers one clue to the road's significance. Boherygeela derives from the Irish Bóthar Ó gCadhla, meaning the road of Uí Chadhla, and it is quite possible the place takes its name from this very trackway. Archaeologist Margaret Gowen excavated a short section of it in 1986, ahead of the construction of the Bord Gáis Éireann gas pipeline, and what she found beneath the surface was a thinly metalled road surface of angular limestone pebbles and stones, up to ten or fifteen centimetres in size, with a maximum recorded width of 5.2 metres in one cutting and likely up to 6.5 metres elsewhere. Two small depressions in the surface of the second cutting may represent ancient wheel ruts. Gowen noted that the road's sectional profile closely resembles that of the Cladh na Leac at Lough Gur, a similarly constructed feature considered to be of possible prehistoric date. No datable finds were recovered from sealed contexts, so the age of the Boherygeela trackway remains uncertain. It was, however, almost certainly in use during the medieval period: at its northern end it aligns towards the early Christian enclosure at Killorath, and locally the route has long been known as a Mass Path, said to lead to the site of the medieval church of Meanus, which lies roughly half a mile east of the present Roman Catholic church building. Gowen understood it as part of a broader network of roads around Caherguillamore and Meanus, possibly connected to the medieval field-systems of the area.

The trackway sits in reclaimed pasture, with two recorded enclosures in close proximity, one annotated as an entrenchment approximately 105 metres to the west and another about 35 metres to the north. The easiest way to appreciate the full extent of the road is through aerial imagery; orthophotographs taken between 2005 and 2012 show the linear feature with considerable clarity. At its southern end the trackway runs onto an existing laneway still depicted on the older twenty-five-inch Ordnance Survey maps, while the northern end meets a stream or ditch before continuing parallel to the water towards Meanus Cross Roads. Anyone visiting the area with an interest in early roads would do well to cross-reference the aerial record with the lie of the land, and to look out for the subtle rise of the old surface where it has not been entirely smoothed away by agriculture.

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Pete F
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