After a dozen years of campaigning by Westmeath Topic and by local historians to preserve a large and unique 3,000-years- old Bronze Age timber road at Mayne Bog outside Coole – one of the most important oak roads of its type in Europe – it has finally borne fruit, it appears. And what now remains of the ancient road is to be protected and preserved, under a High Court agreement.
Last Thursday, 31 May, the horticultural company, Westland, committed to cease milling peat along the length of the Bronze Age ‘tougher’ (road) and to protect the remaining untouched 200 metres in the high bog and associated structures on their bogs at Mayne in County Westmeath.
The agreement ensures that the 4 – 6 metre wide oak plank road and a buffer zone will be protected from further extraction. The 200 metre section of the road known to remain in the high unworked bog and associated structures will be protected by the creation of a bund to prevent the company’s operations elsewhere on the bog from dewatering these structures. The parties have 3 weeks to agree the details of the design.
Reported by a member of the public in 2005, a small scale investigatory excavation was undertaken by the Department of Environment in 2006 and a carbon dating of 1200 – 820 BC obtained from the superstructure. The initial drainage of the bog had at that time transversed and damaged the plank trackway in 43 places. Unchecked milling of peat since then has exposed much of the 657 metres of the trackway at surface level and is being actively ‘chewed’ by the industrial peat milling machines. Much of it appears to be totally destroyed.
Westland operates a manufacturing facility in Dungannon, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. Its bogs in the midlands contribute 40% of the total peat requirement for their business, which uses peat in the production of a fertiliser called ‘Growing Media’ and employs 220 full time employees. It has 5,000 retail outlets across Ireland and the United Kingdom.
Friends of the Irish Environment (FIE) had first referred the absence of any planning permission to Westmeath County Council in 2010, arguing that these activities required planning permission. The Council referred the question to An Bord Pleanála, and in 2013, the Bord ruled that industrial peat extraction, which had been exempt from planning permission, was no longer exempt from 2013, when implementation of EU law required that any activity requiring an Environmental Impact Statement could not be exempt from planning permission.
Westland Judicially Reviewed the Board’s decision, but a hearing of the case was repeatedly delayed by the State’s commitment to produce new legislation to exempt the operations from planning permission and replace it with a permit system, similar to waste operators, and a requirement for a licence from the Environmental Protection Agency. The Court agreed to the stay on the 2013 An Bord Pleanála ruling on the grounds that to penalise one of the many companies involved in the intensive commercial extraction of peat would be unfair. Agitation by local archaeologist Aidan Walsh in 2014 to save the road was strongly supported by the Westmeath Topic and brought to An Taisce’s attention. Dr. Mark Clinton, Chair of An Taisce’s National Monuments and Antiquities Committee, in turn brought the matter to the Minister’s attention, warning that ‘without development controls, these operations will result in the complete destruction of one of Ireland’s and Europe’s oldest recorded oak timber built trackways recorded to date’.
Dr. Clinton cited Professor Barry Raftery, late head of Department of Archaeology at the National University of Ireland, who described the scale of construction of these roadways as ‘massive’ and ‘beyond anything hitherto attempted (and indeed unmatched during any subsequent period until the modern era).’
FIE Director Tony Lowes said that “the failure of the state to list this important roadway in the Record of Monuments and Places in 2006 is the root cause of what has happened at Mayne. It should not be left to charities like ourselves to bring legal actions to protect our archaeological heritage, with the risk to the trustees of punitive costs should we fail.”
A photograph (above right) taken in 2006, showing a section of the oak planks up to 6m wide, exposed when the small initial investigation was undertaken by archaeologists in 2006.
