{"id":1621,"date":"2014-06-13T12:49:35","date_gmt":"2014-06-13T12:49:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kildare.ie\/ehistory\/?p=1621"},"modified":"2014-06-13T12:49:35","modified_gmt":"2014-06-13T12:49:35","slug":"newbridge-vigilantes-block-transport-of-children-to-england-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kildarelibraries.ie\/ehistory\/newbridge-vigilantes-block-transport-of-children-to-england-2\/","title":{"rendered":"THIRTY YEARS OF THE NAAS BY-PASS … THREE HUNDRED YEARS OF TRAVELLERS’ TALES"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thirty years of the Naas by-pass \u2026 three hundred years of travellers\u2019 tales<\/strong><\/p>\n

Liam Kenny<\/strong><\/p>\n

The last thirty years have gone quickly \u2013 so quickly that it might take some convincing to believe that next month marks the 30th anniversary of the opening of the Naas by-pass \u2013 Ireland\u2019s first motorway. Little did those who attended that occasion on an autumn morning in 1983 envisage that in time the Naas-by pass (or \u201cMotorway Seven\u201d to give its correct title) would be the first instalment in a network of motorway standard roads which would extend from Dublin to the major cities in the south and west.<\/p>\n

It would be another decade and more before the motorway\u2019s asphalt surfaces extended west and south through Co Kildare in the process by-passing Newbridge, Kildare, Monasterevin as the full M7 project was rolled out. Similarly the Kilkenny\/Waterford road became the M9 motorway opening up an alternative route to the great Norman cities of the south-east and passing Kilcullen and Castledermot as it went.<\/p>\n

Not alone was the lie of the land changed in a material way by the construction of the new roads but so too were the mental maps by which we confirm our sense of place. New connections were made and old links disrupted as the road building traversed the county. Although strangely despite all the new infrastructure it is still as difficult as ever to get from east Kildare to north Kildare. The Leixlip-Celbridge-Maynooth corridor on the M4 seems almost a separate place from the Naas-Newbridge-Kildare axis on the M7.<\/p>\n

Whatever about links within the county, Kildare has a long history of travel and transport based on the way in which its geography straddles the lines of communication \u2013 road, rail and canal — converging on the capital city. Another way of saying this is that no traveller making an expedition from Dublin could get anywhere south or south west without going through Co Kildare. A happy outcome of Kildare\u2019s straddling of the main routes through the county is that it has left a library full of reports and records made by travellers on their way through. Naas, as the junction of the old Norman routes to Waterford and Limerick, was the beneficiary of many diary entries in the memoirs of those passing through.<\/p>\n

Our first traveller in time is Arthur Young who, in 1777, toured the country and made a close study of the living conditions of the people: \u201cLeft Dublin on 24th September, and taking the road to Naas, I was again struck by the great population of the country, the cabbins being so much poorer in the vicinity of the capital than in the more distant parts of the kingdom.\u201d\u00a0 A few years later another wandering scribe, one Austin Cooper came this way. In his diary of 1781 he remarked of the county town: \u201cThe town of Naas is small and old looking, having some ancient castles built there-in.\u201d He surveyed the ruins of an old Dominican Abbey and his conclusions would hardly have endeared him to the tidy towns committee of the day: \u201cOf it remains a small square steeple on an arch \u2026 but a more ruinous pile I have never yet seen.\u201d<\/p>\n

The position of Naas as a sort of cross-roads of the nation was repeatedly stressed in old accounts. One of the early travel books \u2013 \u201cThe Travellers New Guide through Ireland\u201d \u2013 published in 1819 relates: \u201cOn the great southern mail-coach road, the County of Kildare commences \u2026 beyond the fifteen milestone (English miles) stands the town of Naas on a lofty ridge of ground.\u201d\u00a0 The guide described the dividing of the two main routes to the south in the town of Naas \u2013 a centuries old arrangement altered forever when the town was by-passed in 1983: \u201cFrom the southern end of the town, two mail-coach roads issue, that to the left running to Carlow \u2026 the Limerick Mail Coach road sweeps to the right\u00a0 …\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The county town had all the facilities expected of a town straddling a major highway. In 1828 both the Cork Coaching Company and the Limerick Coaching Company had liveries in the town and an account of that time stated: \u201cThe coaches in those days kept so many horses employed that the west side of Dublin Road and John\u2019s Lane were all full of horses.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a later century one of the most intrepid traveller to pass this way was William Bulfin who braved the rigours of road and weather to tour the country on that most dependable of machines \u2013 the bicycle. His first view of Kildare was from the wind-swept heights where the great road south passes between the hills near the Blackchurch Inn. Travelling at a slow speed he took in the vistas opened up by the subtle gradients in the road as it comes down off the hill at Blackchurch: \u201cA few miles takes you to a noble ridge over one of the richest plains in Leinster \u2026 to the westward sweep the green pastures and meadow and the dark welts of timber \u2026 until the wide-plain grows dim in the soft haze along the horizon and melts into the sky. A little to the southward \u2026 seen in a gap in the wood below you, rises the Hill of Allen which beckons you to the Curragh of Kildare.\u201d<\/p>\n

However Bulfin\u2019s admiration for Kildare\u2019s roadside landscape was no comfort to the impatient travellers of a later era and by the last quarter of the 20th century public opinion spoke of the frustrations of the tail-backs through Naas while townspeople grappled with an onslaught of through traffic. A columnist in a national newspaper spoke of Naas being \u201ca wretched little town\u201d such was his chagrin at being delayed on his itinerary south. But the authorities were listening and in the early 1980s an arc around the town was populated by yellow machines digging up the gluey clay and laying down miles of pristine asphalt. Ireland\u2019s first motorway was under construction and things would never be the same again. Leinster Leader<\/em> 24 september 2013, Looking Back, Series no: 350.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thirty years of the Naas by-pass \u2026 three hundred years of travellers\u2019 tales Liam Kenny The last thirty years have gone quickly \u2013 so quickly that it might take some convincing to believe that next month marks the 30th anniversary of the opening of the Naas by-pass \u2013 Ireland\u2019s first motorway. Little did those who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1621","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-looking-back"],"blocksy_meta":[],"featured_image_src":null,"featured_image_src_square":null,"author_info":{"display_name":"Kildare Local Studies","author_link":"https:\/\/kildarelibraries.ie\/ehistory\/author\/localstudies\/"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kildarelibraries.ie\/ehistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1621","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kildarelibraries.ie\/ehistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kildarelibraries.ie\/ehistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kildarelibraries.ie\/ehistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kildarelibraries.ie\/ehistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1621"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kildarelibraries.ie\/ehistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1621\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kildarelibraries.ie\/ehistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kildarelibraries.ie\/ehistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kildarelibraries.ie\/ehistory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}