Irish Stew Podcast is “Off the Beaten Craic” in Co. Longford for the sound of the low whistle and the sight of an Iron Age roadway at the Corlea Trackway Visitors Centre, located a half hour’s drive north from their home-away-from-home in Athlone. There they met their guide Noel Carberry who opens and closes the interview with his virtuosity on the larger, lower-pitched variation of the traditional tin whistle.

Noel is a 26-year-veteran of the Corlea Trackway Visitors Centre, a “life sentence’ as he jokingly calls it, but beyond the bog he’s best known as an expert musician of the uilleann pipes, the Irish tin and low whistles, and bodhrán.

He brings Ireland’s Iron Age dramatically to life through his expert commentary on the Corlea Trackway, the widest prehistoric road of its kind discovered in Europe. Laid down in oak planks between the autumn of 148 BC and the spring of 147 BC, this one-kilometer wooden roadway once stretched from dry land to dry land across the bog, a monumental and mysterious statement of power and belief in the Hidden Heartlands.

“What you’re talking about is a prehistoric planked road, for all the world like a railway track upside down, with planks of oak laid down on runners of ash, oak, or silver birch,” he says.

Noel tells of growing up in the nearby workers housing of Bord na Móna, the Irish agency which extracted peat to fuel power plants. That same industrial extraction uncovered the buried trackway in 1984, when milled peat operations stripped the bog down to the level of the ancient timbers and a worker with an interest in archaeology realized their importance.

For Noel, the ancient trackway may have been less a simple road than a display of dominance, possibly built with timber taken from defeated neighbors, their sacred oaks regarded as the reincarnation of ancestral spirits.

On view at Corlea are eighteen meters of preserved roadway saved from industrial destruction and maintained, presented and compellingly interpreted by the OPW, or Office of Public Works.

With tales of ancient kings, bog bodies, and spirited tunes like “The Rocky Road to Dublin” echoing through the Centre, Noel makes a compelling case that Ireland’s true story runs not just around the coasts, but through the deep, mysterious middle.

With thanks to Noel and the OPW, the podcasters depart for the final Off the Beaten Craic stops in the Hidden Heartlands series with episodes coming up next in County Leitrim.

Links

• Corlea Iron Age Roadway and Visitors Centre
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Episode Details: Season 8, Episode 2; Total Episode Count: 144