Road - road/trackway, Carrigeensharragh, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Roads & Tracks

Road – road/trackway, Carrigeensharragh, Co. Tipperary

In a field in Carrigeensharragh, County Tipperary, the faint remains of an old road survive as little more than two low earthen banks flanking a narrow corridor of ground.

The trackway is about four metres wide, modest enough to pass unnoticed, yet the banks on either side retain a measurable profile, the eastern bank still rising to just over half a metre above the surrounding terrain. What makes this strip of ground worth pausing over is not its scale but its situation: it runs north to south, directly connecting an old graveyard to the upper corner of an adjacent field, over a distance of roughly one hundred metres, with the River Moyle lying at the base of the slope to the east and south-east.

The trackway appears to be one surviving fragment of a more extensive route. The second edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, published in 1906, recorded a hollow-way at the southern end of this alignment, a hollow-way being a path worn down over time by repeated use until it sits below the level of the surrounding land. That feature has since been levelled and is no longer visible on the ground, but the map evidence links this stretch of banked road to a nearby ringfort. Ringforts, the most common field monument in Ireland, were enclosed farmsteads typically dating from the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to the twelfth centuries, and a dedicated track connecting one to a burial ground is a telling detail about how this small piece of landscape was once organised and used. The banks that defined the road, and the hollow-way that extended it, together suggest a routeway that served both the living and the dead across this undulating ground above the Moyle.

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Pete F
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