Roads in Ireland - History

History

There have been routes and trackways in Ireland connecting settlements and facilitating trade since ancient times. Ireland was never part of the Roman Empire and, therefore, Roman roads were not built in Ireland. However, an Iron Age road with a stone surface has been excavated in Munster and togher (Irish: tóchar) roads, a type of causeway built through bogs, were found in many areas of the country.

According to an entry in the Annals of the Four Masters for AD 123, there were five principal highways (Irish: slighe) leading to Tara (Irish: Teamhair) in Early Medieval Ireland.

Early medieval law-tracts set out five types of road including the highway (slighe), the ' main road' (ród or rout), the 'connecting road' (lámraite), the 'side road' (tógraite) which could be tolled, and the 'cow road' (bóthar). Bóthar is the most common term for 'road' in modern Irish: its diminutive form, bóithrín, (or boreen in English) is used as a term for very narrow, rural roads.

The development of roads in Ireland seemed to have stagnated until the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries. However, in the 18th century, a network of turnpike roads (charging tolls) was built: "a turnpike was a primitive form of turnstile - a gate across the road, opened on payment of a toll. The average length of a turnpike road was 30 miles". Routes to and from Dublin were developed initially and the network spread throughout the country. Turnpikes operated between 1729 and 1858 when the extensive railway network made them increasingly unpopular.

Specialist routes to facilitate the butter trade, which centered on Cork, were built in Munster. The first butter road was commissioned in 1748 and was built by John Murphy of Castleisland in County Kerry. In other areas, notably in County Wicklow, military roads were built to help secure British military control over remote areas. The Military Road through County Wicklow was begun in 1800 and completed in 1809. The R115 is part of the Military Road for its entire length.

Railways became the dominant form of land transport from the mid-19th century. This situation persisted until the first half of the 20th century when motorised road transport (cars, buses and trucks) gradually began to take over from railways as the most important form of land transport.

Pre-independence legislation (the Ministry of Transport Act, 1919) laid the foundation for the regulation of the modern system of public roads in Ireland. The Act gave the Minister for Local Government the power to classify roads: Trunk Road Funds were used to enable local councils to improve major roads and road surfacing was gradually undertaken throughout the 1920s, 1930s and beyond.

By the 1950s an established system of road classification and numbering with Trunk Roads and Link Roads had long been developed. The present system of road classification and numbering began in 1977 when twenty-five National Primary roads and thirty-three National Secondary roads were designated.

Regional roads were first formally designated in 1994, although Regional road route-numbers began appearing on signposts in the 1980s. The Roads Act 1993 also classified all public roads which are not national or regional roads as local roads.