Road - road/trackway, Folkstown Little, Co. Dublin

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Roads & Tracks

Road – road/trackway, Folkstown Little, Co. Dublin

A road that nobody knew existed until a planning application brought in the archaeologists is, in its way, a quietly satisfying thing.

At Folkstown Little in County Dublin, excavation ahead of a proposed development uncovered a metalled trackway, that is, a deliberately surfaced road rather than a worn path, running north-north-east to south-south-west and measuring around 13.5 metres in width. That is a substantial road by any era's standards, and it kept going beyond the limits of the excavation in both directions, suggesting it was no local lane but something more purposeful, connecting places that mattered to the people who built and used it.

The finds recovered from the site help place it in time, though they also leave room for uncertainty. A pit that had been cut directly into the trackway's surface contained thirteenth-century pottery, meaning the road itself must predate that disturbance. Three horseshoes were recovered from a silt deposit that had partially buried the trackway in a low-lying area prone to flooding. The horseshoes were identified as Clark Type 1, a classification that places them anywhere from the late ninth to the thirteenth century. That is a wide window, but it is consistent with a road that may have been in use across several generations, gradually silting up in the wetter patches while wheel ruts, still visible in places during excavation, recorded the passage of carts and wagons long before anyone thought to write the journey down.

The site at Folkstown Little is not publicly accessible as a visible monument; what was uncovered here came to light through development-led archaeology under licence number 10E0010, and the excavated material has since passed into the documentary and archival record rather than remaining open to view. For anyone interested in finding it on a map, Folkstown Little lies in north County Dublin. The value of a site like this is less about what you can stand beside and more about what it implies: a medieval road of considerable width, used by shod horses and wheeled vehicles, running across low ground that sometimes flooded, connecting somewhere to somewhere else entirely, and waiting undisturbed beneath the fields until the twentieth century finally ran out of patience with it.

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Folkstown Little, Co. Dublin
53.60023289,-6.20362885

Ref: DU04558

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