Follow the Old Road

By turning off the main highway and discovering old routes, some of which have been travelled for thousands of years, you will see Ireland in an entirely different way. Follow the Old Road will take you on a tour of a variety of pathways from great river roads to lost railways. Peaceful waterways, lonely mountain lanes, forgotten railway tracks and ancient sea-roads: over the centuries, these connected the tiny villages and bustling towns of Ireland. From the green glens of Antrim to the wild Kerry islands, the old routes were used by all walks of life, from pilgrims to nobility, farming folk to merchants: for worship or war, commerce or contact. Now largely forgotten, usurped by the bypass and the motorway, these ancient pathways have become part of a hidden landscape. In Follow the Old Road, Jo Kerrigan beckons us on a magical journey from the present to the past, as she takes us through the history and legends of these pathways, and the stories of those who travelled them. In so doing, she reveals a mysterious world still to be discovered in today’s Ireland. By turning off the main highway and discovering old routes, some of which have been travelled for thousands of years, you will see Ireland in an entirely different way. Follow the Old Road will take you on a tour of a variety of pathways from great river roads to lost railways. Long before records began, travellers arriving on our shores found safe havens, natural harbours, the estuaries of rivers, and settled there, in sight of the ocean that had brought them to this land. Gradually they moved inland to more fertile soil, usually along the course of a river that provided both guidance and essential water supplies. In later centuries, great lords built their castles and monks their abbeys upriver, at the tidal…