Did Your Irish Ancestors Walk This Road?

Céad Míle Fáilte, and you are very welcome to this week’s Letter from Ireland. The August weather continues to treat us well here in much of Ireland, although (say it quietly) we could do with some more rain! How are things in your part of the world today?

Given that this is “travelling season” here in Ireland, I thought it would be a good idea to chat about some of the ancient ways our ancestors used to get around the island – when the need arose. So, I’m having a cup of Lyons tea as I write and I do hope you’ll join me with a cup of whatever you fancy yourself as we take to the roads in today’s letter.

A reader called Cassie Ryan wrote to me last week with a question that gave rise to the subject of today’s letter. She had been up in Thurles, in County Tipperary, earlier in the summer and fell into conversation with an elderly gentleman on the street.

The man asked her, more than once, whether she knew the town of Thurles stood upon an ancient route, a road the people here had travelled since the time of the Celts. He said the name of it a few times over, but in the end she had to ask him to write it down.

So, there it was on the scrap of paper: “Slí Dála” – which he pronounced “Shlee Dawla”.

“I would love to know a little more about these ancient ways,” she wrote. “Were our ancestors aware of them? Can I travel them today?”

Well now, let’s see if we can follow that old road together.

All Roads Lead to Tara

Long before Ireland had anything resembling its modern road network, this country had its “slí”. The word – you might also see the older spelling, “slighe” – was used for an important road or highway.

On the rung below those great roads came the ways ordinary people used every day, the “bóthar” (pronounced “BOE-har”) most of all. The word comes from “bó”, the Irish for a cow, and a bóthar was a laneway broad enough for cattle to pass along it. It remains the Irish word for a road to this day.

Early Irish tradition remembered five great slí leading from Tara in what is now County Meath, the ancient seat associated with the High Kings of Ireland. They ran out across the island in different directions and among them was the road that appeared on Cassie’s scrap of paper: the Slí Dála.

This is where tracking down the location of an old Irish road becomes a little elusive. The old man in Thurles was quite right that the Slí Dála was one of the great roads remembered in early Ireland. The old descriptions take it southwards from the world of Tara, through the territory of Osraige, roughly what is now County Kilkenny, and towards Cashel in Munster.

There are old associations with the road around Roscrea in north Tipperary, not very far at all from Thurles. But try to lay the entire Slí Dála neatly across a modern map and things become less certain.

We know the general direction of these ancient routes much better than we know every mile they followed. Some stretches were most likely absorbed into later roads. Others have disappeared altogether beneath fields, towns and centuries of rebuilding.

And these routes certainly belonged to a very old world. Medieval tradition placed the five great roads deep in Ireland’s legendary past, while archaeology shows that substantial roads were being built here more than two thousand years ago.

Up in County Longford, for example, the remains of an enormous roadway built from oak timbers was uncovered at Corlea. Tree-ring dating showed that the timbers had been cut in 148 BC.

Corlea was not part of the Slí Dála, of course, but it shows that people in Ireland were capable of organising the labour, timber and engineering needed to build substantial roads across difficult ground long before the arrival of anything resembling our modern road system.

Somewhere beneath the roads of Tipperary, Kilkenny and the Irish midlands lies a much older geography, joining kingdoms, settlements and gathering places long before our modern counties were ever imagined.

Were our ancestors aware of them?

I think many of them were, although perhaps not in quite the way we imagine today. These larger roads mattered to kings and merchants, cattle drovers, pilgrims and anyone travelling any great distance across the country.

But most of our own ancestors, particularly those farming a few acres, would have spent much of their lives much closer to home. Their everyday world was made up of the bóthar, the lane, the field path and the tracks between settlements.

From time to time, though, they may have joined the larger roads to go to fairs and markets, or on pilgrimages. Cattle were driven long distances along old routes. News, soldiers, strangers and goods travelled the same way.

Over the centuries, the names of the ancient roads faded from everyday memory, but in places their general lines survived. Later travellers followed some of the same corridors, and modern roads sometimes grew out of much older routes through the landscape. So your ancestor might never have heard the words Slí Dála, but they may have walked where it once ran.

Can you still find these roads today?

You can, although not always by following a neat line on a map. The Corlea Trackway in County Longford is one wonderful place to begin. A surviving section of that oak road from 148 BC is preserved there, and you can stand looking down upon timbers laid across an Irish bog more than two thousand years ago.

And, of course, there is Tara itself. You can still walk across the Hill of Tara in County Meath and look out over the surrounding countryside, knowing that for generations of Irish storytellers this was the centre towards which the great roads of Ireland ran.

But, perhaps you don’t need to visit Tara or Corlea at all.

The road beneath the road

I think that is what stayed with me about what the old man in Thurles said. While the precise line of his ancient road was a little more complicated than he made it sound, the main message he was trying to tell Cassie was true.

The ordinary road beneath your feet in Ireland may have another road beneath it. And beneath that one, perhaps another again.

People have been moving through this landscape for thousands of years – going to markets and monasteries, fairs and funerals, battles and weddings, and onwards to the ports. Most of them left no written account of the journey. But when you walk the roads and ground your ancestors walked – perhaps you will feel their story.

So, let me leave you with one question this week:

Have you ever walked the roads and fields that your Irish ancestors walked? How did it feel to be there?

Do let me know in the comments section below, I’d love to hear of your experiences (or plans or wishes!).

Slán for now,

Mike.