Road - road/trackway, Grange (Smallcounty By.), Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Roads & Tracks
A road that disappears from the historical record halfway along its length is an odd thing to encounter, even on paper.
This trackway in the townland of Grange, in County Limerick's Smallcounty Barony, survives as a faint but legible feature in aerial photography and satellite imagery, running for roughly 500 metres along the northern side of a ridge. What makes it quietly peculiar is that the Ordnance Survey's first edition six-inch map, surveyed around 1840, recorded only the northwestern portion, showing it then as a tree-lined road. The southern stretch went unrecorded entirely. By the time the 25-inch revision appeared in 1897, even the northwestern section had been reduced to a field boundary, that particular category of survival in which old routes cease to carry people but linger on as lines in the landscape.
The trackway's significance sharpens when you consider its probable connections. It appears to be an extension of the Cladh na Leac, a named historic road that runs along the western side of Lough Gur, one of the most archaeologically dense areas in Ireland. The ridge it follows is not an isolated feature. Thirty metres to the southwest lies a ring-barrow, a low circular burial mound of the kind typically associated with the Bronze Age, and 270 metres to the south, near the ridge summit, there is a cave site. To the north, the Camoge River runs 580 metres away. The road, when visible on aerial photographs, presents as a linear feature flanked on both sides by a ditch and outer fosse, giving it an external width of around 15 metres, which suggests something more deliberate than a field path.
The site does not announce itself on the ground. Visitors familiar with Lough Gur, which lies a short distance to the west, may approach from that direction, using the Cladh na Leac as a point of reference. The ridge itself offers open views to the north, east, and west, which helps with orientation. The clearest way to appreciate the trackway's layout is through the Google Earth imagery taken in June 2018 or through the Ordnance Survey orthoimages, where the linear ditching is easier to read than anything currently visible at field level. Anyone with an interest in how ancient routes connect burial monuments, water sources, and cave sites in this part of Limerick will find the comparative geography worth the effort of working out.