Our understanding of transport and travel in the bronze age is extremely vague. We know that during this period that the boglands in Ireland were increasing, but there were still great areas of impenetrable woods. We know that these bronze age people seemed to get around because the Beaker people migrated to Ireland bringing their expertise and ideas. Did they walk through Europe? How did they get across the sea? The Bronze Age dugout canoe from Lurgan would hardly have done the business in a heavy storm. So how did they travel?
Wooden trackways, 2.5 metre wide made from oak logs covered in branches, have been discovered from the early bronze age at Corlea Co. Longford. Those would have handy for travelling across the bog on foot but they were hardly suitable for horse drawn vehicles, so was it all pedestrian travel?
Certainly, we know from the wooden block wheel that came from Timahoe East in Co.Kildare and the wooden yoke discovered from the same period, that they had animal drawn vehicles in the late bronze age, but how did they manage in the early bronze age? And did they have trackways through the woods for this type of animal transport?
Did they navigate the rivers or follow tracks along the riverways ? How did they know where they would find copper and tin to make their bronze implements?
I look at the Labbacalle lines and it seems to me that there was a system of operating that is unfamiliar to us. How is it that these radiating lines travel through the largest of our present day cities, towns, ports, islands, lakes , copper and tin mines?
I look at standing stones dotted around Ireland and I wonder if they are sign posts, and if these posts mark distances to various places? What do you think?