Togher Patrick, Pollawaddy, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Roads & Tracks

Togher Patrick, Pollawaddy, Co. Mayo

A path that exists more convincingly on nineteenth-century maps than on the ground is an odd thing to go looking for, yet that is precisely what this stretch of Togher Patrick amounts to.

There are no kerb stones, no worn causeway, no physical corridor cut through the land. What survives instead is a dashed line on old Ordnance Survey sheets, a ghost of a route that once guided pilgrims across this part of County Mayo.

Togher Patrick is the ancient overland pilgrimage road connecting Ballintubber Abbey, a twelfth-century Augustinian foundation, to the summit of Croagh Patrick, the mountain above Clew Bay that has drawn Christian and pre-Christian devotion for centuries. The section recorded at Pollawaddy runs for roughly 500 metres in an east-west direction, which makes sense given the overall logic of the route: eastward from the mountain, toward the abbey. On the 1839 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the full 500 metres is depicted as a dashed line that in places follows field boundaries, suggesting the route had already been absorbed into the working agricultural landscape rather than maintained as a distinct road. By the 1930 edition, the eastern 250 metres or so had been dropped from the cartographers' record altogether, leaving only the western portion still marked. That western end terminates at a standing stone known as Clogh Patrick, a name that points directly to the pilgrimage tradition and suggests the stone functioned as a deliberate waymark, a fixed point in the landscape that told walkers they were on the right course. The togher in the place name refers to a causeway or path, often one laid across boggy ground, though here no physical construction of that kind has been identified.

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