Court hears details of disputed right of way

Walkers have used a disputed right of way past "one of the most unusual houses in Ireland" in the Glencree Valley for up to 50 years, Wicklow Circuit Court has been told.

Nineteenth-century maps show a track at the location of the disputed right of way, known as Lamb's Lane, the court also heard during proceedings in which Neil Collen, of Old Boley, is seeking a permanent injunction preventing walkers entering his lands.

The case is seen as a legal test pitting the rights of walkers to access against those of landowners to privacy.

At the second day of hearing yesterday, several long-time residents of the valley recalled seeing hikers walking in the area in the 1950s. Dorothy O'Rourke said she had used the lane since she was a child in the late 1940s. She went to school along the track and later walked it to work in Powerscourt Estate. She often used the lane when it snowed and she couldn't get her car out of the driveway.

She told Peter Bland, barrister for Mr Collen, that hundreds of people used the track, not all of them local people. In the 1950s, "Germans with big backpacks" would come down there for walks from the reconciliation centre in Glencree.

Another local, Teresa Laverty (64), told the court of meeting hikers going to Lough Bray. "People didn't go away as much years ago as they do now. It was a big thing then to go to Glencree."

However, Patsy Quinn, whose family lived five generations in the valley, said he never saw any hikers until recently. No one apart from locals had good reason to go down Lamb's Lane, which he considered a short cut rather than a right of way.

Noel Barry, a bus-driver who is secretary of the Enniskerry Walking Association, said he first ran along the disputed route in the early 1980s while training for a marathon.

Mr Bland said the fact that Mr Barry had run along the track did not make it a right of way. The route was not registered as a right of way, nor had it been included on a "candidate list" of traditional rights of way drawn up by Wicklow council and later withdrawn. He suggested the witness had not run the route. If Mr Barry had, he would have been seen by others.

Tony Carroll, who grew up further down the Glencree Valley at Crone, said he had walked the route for over 25 years. His father, who worked in forestry for 40 years, had also used it.

Mr Bland said the witness lived six miles away from the lane and it wasn't true that he had walked it for 25 years. He had only begun to walk it following the publication of a 1992 booklet which included the track in a list of walks in the area.

This publication had invited walkers to "marvel" at Mr Collen's house, "one of the most unusual houses in Ireland", counsel said. Most of the structure lay underground while the roof was covered in grass.

Mr Carroll insisted he had walked the route for many years. Six miles would be "nothing" to him to walk, he said.

Andrew Bonar-Law, the author of several books on Irish maps, provided the court with a number of 19th-century Ordnance Survey maps, all of which appear to show a track where the disputed right of way is located.

The case is expected to conclude today.