Road - road/trackway, Rosclogher, Co. Leitrim
Co. Leitrim |
Roads & Tracks
Along the southern shore of Lough Melvin in County Leitrim, a low field bank runs roughly northwest to southeast for around a hundred metres, extending away from an old churchyard at Rosclogher.
It is modest enough to pass without a second thought, yet it carries the faint outline of a road that was already being mapped almost two centuries ago.
The 1835 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, one of the earliest detailed cartographic surveys of the Irish countryside, recorded this short northwest to southeast roadway as it extended southeast from the churchyard. At that time it was associated with nineteenth-century houses in the area, suggesting it functioned as a local access route rather than anything of great antiquity. Today, part of it persists as a field bank, the kind of earthen boundary that forms when a track falls out of use and the ground on either side is gradually cultivated or enclosed around it. Whether the route beneath that bank is older than the nineteenth century is genuinely uncertain; the record does not claim it to be ancient, and that honesty is part of what makes it interesting. Roads that appear on early maps are not always old roads, and this one may simply be the ghost of a lane that served a small rural settlement and quietly disappeared when those houses did too.