Road - road/trackway, Poulacarran, Co. Clare

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Roads & Tracks

Road – road/trackway, Poulacarran, Co. Clare

A short stretch of old road near Carran in County Clare survives not as a dramatic ruin but as a quiet crease in the landscape, its edges defined by grass-covered walls and its surface sunk just enough below the surrounding pasture to suggest it once carried real and regular use.

About 42 metres of it can still be traced, running roughly six metres wide and parallel to the modern road, beginning at the south-west corner of a former house and heading south across level ground that looks out over the Poulacarran Valley to the east.

This trackway is one element of a broader settlement cluster concentrated in the level pasture immediately north-west of Carran Church and its associated graveyard. The presence of multiple features in close proximity, including a second road or trackway lying to the north, points to a locality that was once organised and inhabited in a more substantial way than the open fields now suggest. Just to the south-east of where the trackway ends, there is a small rectangular quarry with a flat bottom and well-defined sides on three faces, measuring roughly eleven metres north to south and seven metres east to west, and no more than half a metre deep. Quarries of this kind, cut close to roads and settlement areas, were typically used to extract stone or surface material for local construction and maintenance, meaning the road and the quarry were almost certainly part of the same working landscape, each serving the other.

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Pete F
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