Follow The Old Road Jo Kerrigane - Jo Kerrigan

Discover The Ireland of Yesteryear.

Follow the Old Road will take you on a tour of a variety of pathways from great river roads to lost railways and will take you on a journey from past to present through the history and legends of these pathways and the stories of those who travelled them.

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 limit. Villages, and, later on, towns grew up around these castles and abbeys to serve their needs; towns that still prosper today. Later the canals and railways were developed. Motor-ways and dual carriageways that bypass towns and villages shorten our journeys but the amount you miss by following the main route is incalculable. 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.