Road - road/trackway, Bray, Co. Kerry

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Roads & Tracks

Road – road/trackway, Bray, Co. Kerry

Half a metre beneath the surface of a Kerry bog, there is a road.

Not a ruined one, exactly, since it never collapsed so much as disappeared, swallowed gradually by the accumulating peat that has kept it intact for roughly two thousand years. It is built from earth and stone, threading its way around a small rock-knoll on the western side of the Imlagh Basin on the Iveragh Peninsula, and it survives in the condition bogs tend to preserve things: airless, waterlogged, and largely forgotten.

The trackway belongs to a category archaeologists call intra-peat roads, meaning it was laid down while the bog was already forming around it, rather than being buried by later peat growth alone. Radiocarbon dating of peat sampled from directly beneath the structure returned a determination of 2020 plus or minus 80 BP, placing its construction somewhere around the turn of the first millennium, in the late Iron Age. At that period, the Imlagh Basin would have been a wet, difficult landscape to cross, and a made road of earth and stone, carefully skirting natural obstacles like the rock-knoll it still curves around today, would have represented a meaningful investment of effort. Who used it, and to connect what, the surviving evidence does not say.

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