A road trip through the past best describes a new book just hot off the press.
Written by Lyreacrompane native, Joe Harrington, its 364 full colour pages and 315 images, maps and photos is an account of the very first Butter Road from Kerry to the Cork Butter Market.
Joe describes the book, which took five years to compile, as a “search for the olden days on a sixty-mile journey through 275 years of time and I thought ‘Once Upon a Road’ was an appropriate title for a book on local, and not so local, history.”
The subject of the book is the road from Ballyduhig, near the Six Crosses, through Lyreacrompane, Castleisland, Cordal, Tooreencahill, Millstreert, Aubane, Vicarstown, to Kerry Pike outside Cork City.
Built by a Castleisland Man
The road was built under a 1747 Act of Parliament by a Castleisland man, John Murphy, who had the right, for 61 years, to place six toll gates at different points on the turnpike road.
The story of the road first appeared a couple of years ago in a song by Joe entitled ‘The Road John Murphy Made’ which won the Sean McCarthy Ballad Competition.
“The ballad was about one man’s trip on the road in the 1750s and the book broadens the story,” Joe explained.
“In a time when butter was gold this first Kerry to Cork turnpike/toll road provided a passage from the dairy lands of North and East Kerry to the already renowned Cork Butter Market.
Dipping into Local History
“Every mile on ‘The Road John Murphy Made’ tells its own tale and along the way we will meet Whiteboys and hedge schoolmasters, freedom fighters and Moonlighters, famines and natural disasters, Mass rocks and wedge tombs, bronze-age hoards and bog butter, lost estates and evicted tenants – and the part played by the road in the slave trade.”
Once Upon a Road dips into the local history of the townlands, towns, villages and settlements through which the road passes.
Castleisland – For Example
“An example is Castleisland – an area that deserves a book all to itself. From the grave of Diarmuid Donn in Derreen, through Cordal and Kilmurry to Castleisland town, history has left many marks and we visit them all in the course of the book.
“From Ballyduhig where the road began near the present day Six Crosses to Kerry Pike near Cork City the book is a travelogue in time and place and I would like to thank all the local historians along the route who unstintingly related to me what they had discovered about their own area and, on a road known for its ‘straight as a gun-barrell’ stretches. To Kay O’Leary, who, so to speak, kept me on the straight and narrow.
Widely Available Locally
The book, which Joe was delighted to have printed locally by Walsh Colour Print, Castleisland with graphic design by Easy Design, Causeway, is widely available including from Joe Harrington, Lyreacrompane. Joe can be contacted at 087 2853570.
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