Road - road/trackway, Camus, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Roads & Tracks

Road – road/trackway, Camus, Co. Tipperary

In a level Tipperary pasture, a low ridge of stone and sod runs across the ground at barely a hand's breadth above the surrounding grass.

It is a trackway, roughly 2.4 metres wide, and what makes it quietly remarkable is how much of its old logic survives. The best-preserved section runs westward for 24 metres from a roadside gate before turning almost at a right angle to continue southward, its edges still lined with rough stone kerbing that keeps the whole thing legible as a deliberate, engineered path rather than a natural feature of the land.

The trackway appears to date from the 18th or 19th century, and the first edition six-inch Ordnance Survey map of 1840 records two distinct sections of it. One led from the road toward a building and a lime kiln, a lime kiln being a small industrial structure used to burn limestone into quicklime for agricultural use, common across rural Ireland in this period. The second section ran south-eastward from the ruins of Camus Castle. Curving banks that connect these two lengths of track are thought to be the remnants of walls rather than earthworks in their own right. The more westerly section eventually approaches a bawn, the defensive enclosure associated with a castle or fortified house, and its traces merge into the levelled scarp of that feature. Beyond a small stream crossing, the track continues for at least 40 metres up a gentle slope into what are now the landscaped grounds of Camas Park House, where the surface has been considerably altered. The whole arrangement suggests a working agricultural and domestic landscape, linking road, kiln, castle, and house across ground that has been in continuous use for centuries.

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Pete F
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