Road - road/trackway, Kilbride, Co. Waterford

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Roads & Tracks

Road – road/trackway, Kilbride, Co. Waterford

Near Kilbride church in County Waterford, an ancient roadway runs roughly north to south through the landscape without leaving any trace that the eye can follow. The road is entirely invisible at ground level, its course detectable only by the presence of clearance cairns, small heaps of stone gathered by farmers over generations as they cleared the land for cultivation. That the road exists at all is a matter of inference and record rather than anything a walker could simply see.

The Reverend P. Power, writing in 1895 in the Waterford Archaeological Journal, noted the roadway in the context of a broader survey of the ancient ruined churches of Waterford. He suggested it likely served as a connecting route between Kilbride church and a post-medieval house situated roughly 130 metres to the south. Power also recorded the possibility of a deserted settlement in the vicinity of the church itself, a reminder that this quiet patch of Waterford countryside was once considerably more inhabited than it appears today. The alignment of the road, running north to south between a place of worship and a later domestic building, hints at the kind of everyday movement that rarely leaves dramatic archaeological traces: the worn path between a community and its church, gradually formalised, gradually forgotten.

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