Road - road/trackway, Cashelfinoge, Co. Roscommon
Co. Roscommon |
Roads & Tracks
On a north-facing slope in the townland of Cashelfinoge, County Roscommon, there is a road that exists more convincingly on paper than it does on the ground.
Aerial photographs suggest a linear earthwork running roughly north to south, most of it following a townland boundary, but visit the site today and there is nothing to see; the feature has no visible presence at ground level whatsoever.
The Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1837 records it as a laneway of roughly 300 metres, terminating at its southern end at a house and stopping short of the main road into Boyle at the north. That gap is telling. The lane never quite connected to the wider road network, at least not as mapped, which raises quiet questions about how it functioned and for whom. Adding a further layer of interest, the southern end of the lane sits approximately 50 metres south-west of a ring-barrow, one of those low circular earthen burial mounds from prehistoric Ireland, which suggests the landscape here had already accumulated significance long before any laneway was laid out. Whether the proximity is coincidence or reflects some older memory of the spot is the kind of question the record cannot answer. What remains is a stretch of Roscommon countryside where a forgotten path, a boundary line, and a burial monument converge in a way that only old maps make legible.
