Road - road/trackway, Ludden More, Co. Limerick

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Roads & Tracks

Road – road/trackway, Ludden More, Co. Limerick

A shallow cut in a hillside in County Limerick is easy to walk past without a second thought.

But what looks like a minor irregularity in the pasture at Ludden More is actually the surviving trace of a named trackway, one that was well-established enough to appear on a twentieth-century Ordnance Survey map yet old enough to have no clear origin on record.

The feature runs on a roughly west-southwest to east-northeast axis along a north-northwest-facing slope at the base of a steep crag. By 1928, when it appeared on the OS six-inch map, it carried the name Boherboulinae, recorded there as the "track of" that name. The Irish word bóithrín, from which "boreen" derives, generally refers to a narrow rural lane or cattle track, and compound place-names of this type were often associated with particular families, destinations, or long-established patterns of movement through the landscape. What is telling is that the 1840 Ordnance Survey map, produced during the first great national mapping effort in Ireland, does not record it at all, which may suggest it was either too minor to be captured at that time or had already begun to fall out of active use. Denis Power, who compiled the site record, notes that the trackway is now visible as a slight terrace roughly 88 metres long and 4 metres wide, cut about a metre into the hillside to the south and built up to a height of around 85 centimetres on the north side, the classic method of creating a level passage across a slope.

The site sits in pasture, so access depends on landowner permission and conditions underfoot will vary considerably with the season. Visiting in drier months makes the subtle earthwork easier to read in the ground; in wet conditions the cut and raised edges can be obscured by vegetation and soft ground. The terrace itself, though reduced from its original estimated length of around 200 metres, is still legible as a deliberate piece of landscape engineering once you know what to look for. Standing at the base of the crag and looking along the slope, the slight but consistent change in level becomes clear, a quiet remnant of a route that once had a name and, presumably, a purpose.

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