The Ghost Roads of Ireland's Great Famine (daily.jstor.org)

submitted 1 month ago by ragica@lemmy.ml to c/archaeology@mander.xyz

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Follies are, by definition, frivolous. They are buildings with no purpose. But there is nothing frivolous about this folly’s history. It was built by the starving as an alternative to simple charity—a way to earn a little money and keep body and soul together.

Conolly’s Folly is an early example of make-work infrastructure. That same model was adopted on a much larger scale when the Great Famine struck just over a century later. The British government was ideologically opposed to providing aid without work. As a result, all across the Irish landscape, there are “famine roads”—running from nowhere to nowhere and now slowly disappearing into the grass.

They are eerie places. In one case, while working on an excavation, archeologists spoke with a local woman who recalled that, in her childhood, anyone who had to go near the road at night would sprint past it for fear of ghosts.

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[-] KevinFRK@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

Just for amusement in the associations with the name/similarities of intent, see the History section of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellfire_Caves

Also created in the 1740's

this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2026

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Archaeology or archeology[a] is the study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, sites, and cultural landscapes.

Archaeology has various goals, which range from understanding culture history to reconstructing past lifeways to documenting and explaining changes in human societies through time.

The discipline involves surveying, excavation, and eventually analysis of data collected, to learn more about the past. In broad scope, archaeology relies on cross-disciplinary research. Read more...

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