Road - road/trackway, Canburrin, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Roads & Tracks

Road – road/trackway, Canburrin, Co. Kerry

On the lower northern slopes of Beenduff in County Kerry, a bog has been quietly preserving a road that nobody has used for a very long time.

Two parallel rows of stones, set tightly against one another and still protruding some half a metre above the surface of the peat, define a trackway roughly two and a half metres wide. It runs for about 120 metres in a west-south-westerly direction away from a north-flowing river, and intermittent traces continue for a further 200 metres or so to the east of a second river. The bog, by waterlogging and sealing what lies beneath it, has acted as an accidental archive, holding the stones more or less in place while the landscape around them changed beyond recognition.

Trackways of this kind, sometimes called togher in the Irish tradition, were typically constructed to allow movement across boggy or waterlogged ground, and the method here, using contiguous stone rather than the timber more commonly found in lowland bogs, reflects the material available on these rocky Kerry hillsides. The route is not travelling through emptiness. About 50 metres to the south lie four hut sites and an enclosure, suggesting that whoever built and used this track had a settlement nearby, and that the trackway was functional infrastructure connecting those dwellings to a river crossing or to grazing ground beyond. The gaps now visible in the defining stones towards the western end may reflect later disturbance or simply the slow loosening that centuries of frost and shifting ground produce. The site is described in O'Sullivan and Sheehan's 1996 survey of south-west Kerry, which places it within a broader pattern of upland settlement and movement across the peninsula.

Rated 0 out of 5

Visitor Notes

Review type for post source and places source type not found
Added by
Picture of Pete F
Pete F
IrishHistory.com is passionate about helping people discover and connect with the rich stories of their local communities.
Please use the form below to submit any photos you may have of Road – road/trackway, Canburrin, Co. Kerry. We're happy to take any suggested edits you may have too. Please be advised it will take us some time to get to these submissions. Thank you.
Name
Email
Message
Upload images/documents
Maximum file size: 100 MB
If you'd like to add an image or a PDF please do it here.

Advertisement