Road - road/trackway, Croaghane, Co. Limerick

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Roads & Tracks

Road – road/trackway, Croaghane, Co. Limerick

Somewhere in the pastureland of Croaghane in County Limerick, a faint crease runs across a hillside, barely knee-height on one side and barely ankle-deep on the other.

It does not look like much at first glance, and that is precisely what makes it worth looking at. This is not a modern farm track or a drainage furrow but a constructed linear terrace, a section of ancient roadway shaped by human hands and preserved almost entirely by the simple fact that grass kept growing over it.

The trackway was recorded by Denis Power and uploaded to the archaeological record in August 2011. It runs across a gentle slope facing east-northeast, and its construction follows a logic familiar from early road-making across Ireland: the uphill side has been cut into the slope to a depth of around half a metre, while the downhill side is built up to roughly forty centimetres, creating a flattened walking or working surface about four metres wide. From a field boundary the track extends northwest for approximately twenty-seven metres before turning northward and continuing for a further seventy-nine metres, where it ends abruptly at a recently cut field drain. That drain may well account for the truncated appearance of the northern terminus; it is quite possible the original route continued further. The entire surface remains grass-covered, which is both the reason it has survived and the reason it is so easy to miss.

The site sits on private agricultural land, so access would require the landowner's permission. For those who do get to see it, the thing to look for is the subtle interplay of cut and fill across the slope; standing at the lower, eastern edge and looking uphill gives the clearest sense of how the terrace was engineered. The grass cover actually helps here, smoothing over any modern disturbance and letting the original form read as a continuous line across the field. The trackway is undated in the record, and its age has not been established, so it is best approached as an unresolved feature rather than a confirmed monument, something the landscape has quietly held onto without yet giving up its full story.

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Pete F
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