The Study Area

The landscape of North Offaly is dominated with esker, bog and, in the past, extensive natural woodland (Fig. 6.1). An esker is a long, sinuous ridge of sand and gravel, which are the remains of deposits left by rivers of melt-water beneath the surface of glaciers 15,000 years ago.

6.2.1 Eskers

The eskers, being well-drained, elevated, relatively straight, and flanked by wet­lands, are quite suitable for movement, as is clear from the number of trails and roads currently located on these ridges (Fig. 6.2). The Early Medieval routeway known as the Slighe Mor, which is associated with the birth of King Conn Cead- cathach and therefore usually dated to the early 2nd century AD, is defined for much of its course by the Eiscir Riada. From the Early Medieval period onwards, there was a considerable increase in the amount of ecclesiastical settlement in particular along the course of the eskers. It appears that the Midland Corridor would have been a more important inter-regional routeway in prehistory, while the esker probably functioned as a local routeway. The bogs would have been wetter early in their developments, and the eskers would have been attractive features in the attempt to negotiate them. This attraction is demonstrated by the presence of standing stones and burials in proximity to the eskers, suggesting a prehistoric importance to these features.

Fig. 6.2 Roads often follow esker ridges

6.2.2 Bogs

While bogs are obstacles, they are not necessarily impenetrable if one is prepared to invest time and energy in the construction of a trackway. Archaeological investi­gations have revealed numerous timber trackway constructions in these wetland locations ranging in date across prehistory and the medieval periods (Moloney et al. 1995; Irish Archaeological Wetland Unit 2002a, b, c, d, e; Irish Archaeological Wetland Unit 2003a, b, c; Whitaker and O’Carroll 2009). This suggests that there were incentives to traversing the bog, rather than diverting around it on to dry land. The principle incentive would most likely have been the saving of time and energy by substantially shortening a journey. The initial effort of constructing the trackway would be very quickly offset by the ease with which subsequent crossings could be taken.

6.2.3 Hills and Landmarks

The terrain throughout the North Offaly is relatively flat, ranging from 40 m OD around the River Shannon basin in the West, to 90 m in the East. Apart from Croghan Hill, with a height of 234 m, most rises are quite low, but nevertheless highly visible. The practice of navigating through a landscape is most often done by moving in reference to landmarks in a process known as piloting. Hills and other highly visual features tend to act as landmarks to pilot by, and facilitate the development of cognitive maps (see Golledge 2003 for full discussion). While individuals are typically only exposed to local information, hills are a means of introducing more global information, by offering distant landmarks to pilot by, and by offering a vantage point to assess more distant terrain. Such locations are fre­quently mythologised and ritualised, demonstrating the importance of these places to sense of place. In the landscape of North Offaly in particular, rises are often found either side of narrow points in the bogs, meaning they are found at the most appropriate crossing points.

6.2.4 The Slighe Mor

The Slighe Mor routeway is often described as following the course of the Eiscir Riada, but the “esker” is in fact a series of multiple, discontinuous and sometimes parallel ridges, which make it quite difficult to define the exact course of the routeway. A number of suggested courses have been described (O'Lochlainn 1940; Fitzpatrick and O'Brien 1998; O'Keeffe 2001; Geissel 2006), and each suggestion almost certainly represents places where movement took place. However, it is not the intention of this research to identify the exact path of the Slighe Mor. In fact, it is perhaps more appropriate to think of the Slighe Mor as a concept, rather than a fixed path, and the name may have been applied to several paths at different, or even simultaneous, times. Rather, the itinerary produced by Colm O'Lochlainn (1940) for the Slighe Mor is used as a list of nodes between which movement demonstrably happened. O'Lochlainn produced this itinerary through a study of documentary sources and mythologies which record the travels of historical and mythological characters. While exact paths were not recorded, settlements along the way were named. Models are run between these locations in order to understand how movement may have taken place between them. Within the study area, O'Lochlainn describes the Slighe Mor as passing through Rhode, Croghan, Kil- tober, Durrow, Ballycumber, Togher, Ballaghurt and Clonmacnoise. The records usually refer to ecclesiastical settlements, so ecclesiastical sites were chosen, where possible, as the sources and destination points. For locations without a suitable ecclesiastical site, castles were chosen as nodes as they were often placed in ref­erence to routeways.

6.3