Road - road/trackway, Islandmagrath, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Roads & Tracks
On the western bank of the Upper Fergus estuary in County Clare, the foreshore at Islandmagrath holds the remains of a structure that spent three thousand years beneath tidal mud before anyone thought to ask what it really was.
When it was first formally recorded in 1996, the working assumption was that it might be a jetty. It turned out to be something considerably older and stranger: a Late Bronze Age trackway, built from woven wattle and brushwood, laid out across the estuarine clays at a diagonal angle to the shoreline.
The structure runs roughly WNW-ESE, stretching approximately 35 metres in length and about 2 metres wide. It is made up of two lines of vertical or obliquely set post-and-wattle fencing, a technique in which upright posts are interwoven with flexible rods to form a fence panel, with horizontal wattle panels and brushwood packed in between them. A withy tie, a binding made from a twisted or plaited flexible branch, was recovered from the western end. Radiocarbon dating of one of the rods returned a date of 2540 plus or minus 20 BP, placing its construction somewhere between 797 and 551 cal. BC, well within the Late Bronze Age. The structure was first recorded in August 1994 and formally excavated in 2004 by archaeologist A. O'Sullivan. Whether it served as a walkway out across the tidal flats, a platform for fishing or fowling, or a route connecting dry ground to a boat landing, the estuarine setting suggests the people who built it were working closely with the rhythms of the tidal water rather than simply crossing it.