Road - road/trackway, Altnabrocky, Co. Mayo

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Roads & Tracks

Road – road/trackway, Altnabrocky, Co. Mayo

In the bogland of Altnabrocky, in the rough mountain country of County Mayo, a road goes essentially nowhere that anyone can now explain.

It runs for a little over a hundred metres, constructed from peat interspersed with stone, passing between two irregular hillocks and edging towards a river before petering out. It is not an ancient monument in any dramatic sense; there is no evidence to suggest great antiquity. What it is, quietly and stubbornly, is a deliberate path through difficult terrain, built by someone with a purpose that has since dissolved entirely into the bog.

The road was first documented in an undated report by Liam Price, the Irish topographer and legal scholar who died in 1967, who described it simply as 'the track of an old road'. The two hillocks it originates from are known locally as sídheán leathan, and the route runs westward roughly a hundred metres towards a feature referred to as a sheeaun or sídheán, a term that in Irish landscape tradition often denotes a fairy mound but which here corresponds to a possible barrow, a low prehistoric burial mound. The road then continues south-westward towards a river and a short distance beyond. When the site was inspected in 1997, the roadway was still traceable on either side of the possible barrow, measuring about 2.7 metres wide and up to 0.4 metres high at its most visible point. A plantation of coniferous trees had by then swallowed the road approximately sixty metres to the north-east of the barrow, effectively erasing that section from view.

What lingers is the combination of elements: a constructed road of uncertain age and purpose, oriented towards what may be a burial monument, in terrain that would have made any building work considerable labour. Whether it served a ritual function, a practical one, or simply connected a settlement to a river crossing, the bog has kept its own counsel.

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Pete F
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