Salty air no help to West Clare roads

THE sight of a snow plough attempting to dislodge tonnes of snow on the Strand Line in Kilkee, four days before Christmas, underlines the severity of the winter weather even in coastal communities.

Neither did the salty air help to dissuade roads from freezing in the most westerly points of Clare, where even locals, who have lived through decades of harsh winters, couldn’t recall a cooler one.
For several days, when the weather was at its coldest, the Carrigaholt – Kilkee road, along with roads in Cross and Kilbaha were particularly dangerous.
“Going back in living memory, the older people never experienced the likes of it,” Cross parish priest Fr Michael Casey told The Clare Champion. “They would have said that. They’d have remembered bad winters and hard frosts going back but I distinctly would have heard a number of them saying they never experienced the likes of it,” he added.
Fr Casey noted that the salt air streaming in from the plentiful West Clare coast wasn’t much use this time in helping to stave off the ice.
“That would have been said that with the effect of the salt air coming off the sea, you’d never have got really severe frost. They’d have got it once or twice but with this, the temperature was so low all week. We were probably a bit higher than inland but I remember one of the nights we still had it at -10°C,” he noted. 
While schools in Cross or Kilbaha didn’t close, driving conditions were fairly testing.
“They made everybody slow down and go handy,” Fr Casey reflected.
“A good few of the parishioners rallied around on Christmas Eve to clear around the church and gritted and salted it,” he added, referring to the churches in Cross and Kilbaha.
While driving on the labyrinth of back roads was treacherous, Fr Casey says that elderly people who live alone were called to.
“People who needed to be visited and called to were all seen. There wouldn’t have been anyone left isolated or left without attention,” he said. While the snow added to the already alluring scenery in West Clare, people who live in isolated townlands will put up with the sight of disappearing snow in a trade off for navigable roads.