Road nostalgia

Irish Times, Frank McNally, 02.08.2006

When every town in Ireland is finally bypassed, I wonder if we'll suffer from road nostalgia the way Americans do. The latest example of the phenomenon is the new Pixar film Cars - which, among other things, is a loving tribute to Route 66, the "mother road" of Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath.

Route 66 once ran all the way from Chicago to the Pacific Ocean, or just short of the ocean (it stopped at a junction in Los Angeles). It ran the other way too, of course; but not in folk memory. The mother road was defined by its westward direction, heading towards California, freedom, and the open sea. Two-and-a-half thousand miles long, it was the US's tar-covered soul. And like all mothers, it was never fully appreciated until it was gone. Weakened by an endless series of bypasses, it finally breathed its last in Arizona, in 1984.

If Ireland has a mother road, I suppose it would have to be the N6, from Dublin to Galway. It's the road to the west, after all, and to the ocean. But driving what remains of it this week with a cousin from, of all places, Arizona, it was hard to feel nostalgic. In fact, having paid a whopping €2.50 motorway toll only a few miles before being spat back onto the national route at Kinnegad, behind a horse-box, most of the nostalgia I felt thereafter was for the M4.

Only Pixar could make the N6 look beautiful. And even the name-checking talents of the songwriter who wrote Route 66 ("Flagstaff, Arizona/ Don't forget Winona") would need a shotgun to force Kilbeggan, Moate, and Ballinasloe into the same verse. Above all, the road's official name refuses to lend itself to poetry. "N6" sounds as flat as the route itself, which just goes to show the importance of branding, even for transport arteries.

If Route 66 had been named Route 60, as originally planned, people would never have got their kicks on it, at least not in music. And the value of a catchy title is emphasised by the only Irish pop song I know named after an official route number.

The Saw Doctors may well have been suffering from road nostalgia when they wished they were on the N17. But if they'd been born on the N2, like some of us, they would have had to get over it without resorting to lyricism.

Tuam has an unusual prominence in the Irish road song. The classic of the genre is the Rocky Road to Dublin, which also starts out in the east Galway town. Its 19th-century author must have travelled close to the route of what became the N6, although of course he stopped in Mullingar, on what later became the N4, for the night. And while the journey has shortened in the intervening years, the Westmeath stop-over is in an experience I too can claim.

I accept it's not that unusual to have spent a night in Mullingar, but the point is I didn't mean to. In my years as a hitchhiker, it's the only place I ever got stuck. I'd been taking the Dublin-Galway road until, in a rash moment and years before the NRA had the same idea, I bypassed Kinnegad. It was a decision ahead of its time, as I found after standing on Mullingar's Athlone Road late into the night until a sympathetic local, unable to offer a lift, offered me a bed. I knew then what it was like to feel nostalgic for the mother road.

A rival claimant for that title is the Old Bog Road of the song. After all, as the author says, it's where "my mother died last spring-time", and although his girlfriend also dies in a subsequent verse, the mother retains star billing. Where Rocky Road hides the emigrant's nostalgia under a rollicking beat, TOBR lays the emotion on thicker than tarmac. But although it concerns a real place - in North Kildare, if I remember rightly - it's probably too marginal to be a national road song, in either sense of the term.

The road described in We're On the One Road has claims too. Even though it describes a state of mind rather than an actual route, its conclusion that we're on "the road to God knows where" expresses a reality experienced by thousands of people every day in Ireland. In most countries, accurate signposts are considered indispensable to road transport. But with our history of oppression, we are still instinctively reluctant to let such information as the whereabouts of the nearest town fall into the hands of strangers. When tourists complain about the absence of road signs, I always explain it's for security reasons.

But I'm getting off the N6 here, which is a mistake I've made before. So in conclusion, let me say that when I finally got past the horse-box, on the far side of Moate, I experienced just a flicker of advance regret for the N6 that will soon no longer be with us. Then again, even horses get nostalgic for the road sometimes. There hasn't been a race yet in Galway this week in which at least one of them didn't take the opportunity to romp home.

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