Road - road/trackway, Drumacoo, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Roads & Tracks
For a time, what appeared to be the outline of a monastic enclosure at Drumacoo in County Galway turned out, on closer inspection, to be something rather different.
A mid-twentieth-century plan proposed that a roughly oval earthwork, some 290 metres east to west and 125 metres north to south, marked the boundary of the early ecclesiastical site here, with a gap at the north-north-west interpreted as an original entrance. When the 1933 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map was consulted, however, it became clear that the shape in question was not a single enclosing bank but two or three former roadways or trackways, the curves of which had been mistaken for a deliberate perimeter.
The northern of these roads curves from roughly north-west to east, and aerial reconnaissance carried out in 1964 captured part of its course as a cropmark, the kind of faint discolouration in growing vegetation that reveals buried features invisible at ground level. Elsewhere along this section, only a slight indentation in the soil or the low foundation lines of a wall remain to mark its passage. The second trackway branches off at the east-north-east, and appears on both the 1838 and 1933 map editions, curving south and then west towards the church at Drumacoo and possibly continuing to a holy well nearby. A 23-metre stretch of it, about 92 metres east of the church, is still legible on the ground, defined by two irregular lines of large limestone boulders. Sitting on the southern line of boulders, close to a field boundary that cuts across the old route, is a bullaun stone, a boulder bearing one or more cup-shaped depressions that are typically associated with early Christian sites in Ireland and were sometimes used for grinding or ritual purposes. At its north-east end, the trackway changes direction sharply, turning from a north-east to south-west alignment onto a north-west to south-east one, the kind of abrupt turn that hints at deliberate planning rather than casual use.