Road - road/trackway, Lissenhall, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Roads & Tracks
At Lissenhall in County Tipperary, a three-metre-wide metalled road leads up to a nineteenth-century house, which would be unremarkable in itself were it not for a detail preserved on a surveyor's map from 1794.
The cartographer John O'Guerin, working on an estate map of part of the lands of Lissenhall, labelled this route simply as an "Old Road", a designation that implies the track was already considered ancient by the time he set it down on paper.
O'Guerin's map, dated May 1794 and held among the Castle Otway Estate Maps at the National Library of Ireland, captures a moment when estate cartography was becoming increasingly systematic in Ireland. Landowners commissioned detailed surveys of their holdings, and surveyors like O'Guerin recorded not only field boundaries and tenancies but also features of the existing landscape, sometimes preserving the only written evidence we have for older routes. A metalled road, meaning one surfaced with compacted stone or gravel rather than bare earth, represents a meaningful investment of labour, suggesting this particular track served a more than incidental purpose before the present house was ever built. By the time O'Guerin drew his map, whatever original destination or function the road served had apparently already been forgotten, or at least was no longer considered worth noting beyond that quiet, slightly puzzling label.

