Road - road/trackway, Carrowkeel, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Roads & Tracks
At Carrowkeel in County Mayo, a low ridge of earth rising barely knee-high above the surrounding pasture turns out to be something considerably older and more purposeful than it first appears.
The rise, roughly a metre and a half to nearly two metres tall and somewhere between six and fifteen metres wide depending on where you measure, is almost certainly a natural landform, but one that people long ago recognised for exactly what it could offer: a dry crossing through an otherwise impassable stretch of boggy ground. Traces of stone kerbing survive along the upper edges in places, suggesting that whoever used this route took the trouble to define and perhaps reinforce it, turning a convenient quirk of the landscape into a proper causeway or trackway.
The feature runs for around a hundred metres on a northwest to southeast axis, though gorse and blackthorn have colonised much of its length, making a full inspection difficult. Towards its northwestern end, the top of the ridge appears to widen and take on a more rounded profile, which may reflect different patterns of use or simply the underlying natural form. More telling is what happens at the southeastern end, where this informal causeway connects with a trackway recorded on the nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey twenty-five-inch maps, which itself continued southward for roughly two hundred metres before meeting a road of similar vintage. That chain of connections, natural ridge to older trackway to mapped road, suggests a route that was probably in use for a very long time before anyone thought to draw it on paper, quietly stitching together the wet ground of north Connacht one dry passage at a time.