Skip the motorway and take the road less travelled

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood/... I took the one less traveled by/And that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost wrote those lines in 1916, so I doubt he was talking about exiting the motorway at Kill to avoid heavy traffic around Naas. But I was thinking about him when I left the certainty, and safety in numbers, of the M8 and took a ‘back road’. It takes a lot to leave a motorway prematurely. For me, the Ms 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, and 8 (the friendliest one, think about it) and 11 are like hard-won civil rights that we campaigned for back in the days of bottlenecks and tailbacks through Abbeyleix, Enfield, Gorey and other towns. To not use them seems a betrayal of the men who drove the diggers.

But motorways are like ready-meals — quick, but expensive and dissatisfying. There are no surprises. The signs are legible, logical. Nature is kept well-back. If you look up, you’ll sometimes see a cow standing high on the edge of a cutting, looking wistfully over at the other side. You just know the cow is thinking: “I’m sure there used to be a field here.” Every so often, it’s good to travel a back road — even when you don’t have to. And by ‘back road’ I don’t mean the next level down from motorways; I mean proper, beep-the-horn-at-the-corners, pull-in-for-the-lad-with-the-baler, unexpected-hump-that-gives-you-the-weird-feeling-in-your-bottom back road. The one you use if you’re going for a spin, or avoiding questions about the validity of the discs on your windscreen.