The Road To Nowhere That Created
Another
The name Lurgan comes from the Irish for a "long,
low ridge". Lurgan's main street runs along this ridge with the
land sloping away to both the north east and the south west. The
north east is occupied by Lurgan Park, while the area to the south
west was until recently a largely underdeveloped area of derelict
or poorly maintained industrial buildings. There had always been a
plan to have a ring-road around the often congested main street. As
far back as the early 1970s, my late Father obtained outline
planning permission for a petrol station at the bottom of an
orchard that he owned. This was designed to link into the promised
development. Many plans came and went with no progress being made,
apart from the increasing dereliction of the many now empty vested
buildings.The half-mile long Millennium Way was built to traverse
this area parallel to the main street and stimulate its
redevelopment. Beginning at traffic lights on Edward Street it runs
south east, crossing Union Street, before terminating at lights on
Malcolm Road.
Phase 1 of the Millennium Way link road, which
opened in 2002, allowed it to quickly meet its primary objective -
the redevelopment of the lands to the south west of Lurgan town
centre, with many new shops opening in the area, most notably a new
Tesco store. Part of the development of the area now occupied by
Tesco was that many houses were vested. A large section of Carnegie
Street was cleared of formerly domestic housing and the bottom end
of the street was closed to accommodate the Tesco car park. This
newly created Road to Nowhere can be seen if you look up from
Millennium Way, past the front of the store towards the town
centre.
For it to meet its secondary goal - to take
traffic away from the congested town centre, the road really needs
to be extended a little further east, to the Gilford Road /
Banbridge Road junction which are two of the primary destinations
of traffic travelling along the main street.
Since the junction of Banbridge Road and Gilford
Road is built up, this scheme will involve more vesting of property
than phase 1 did. According to oral answers in the Northern Ireland
Assembly in October 2007, planning permission has been granted.
However, the Minister said: "Like other measures proposed in
‘Sub-Regional Transport Plan 2015’, implementation of
the scheme will be subject to the satisfactory completion of an
economic appraisal, successful progression through the statutory
procedures and availability of funding through the normal budgetary
processes. Therefore, I cannot be more definitive about a
commencement date at this time." We can therefore not expect this
scheme to proceed imminently. It is always possible that it will
progress sooner than this if a private developer funds it, perhaps
as a condition of planning permission for developments in the
area.
In the Assembly in September 2008, the Regional
Development Minister said that the scheme would be "included among
the schemes considered for inclusion" in the programme of works for
the next ten years. This doesn't really say anything new, and does
not commit to proceeding with the scheme, but does confirm that the
proposal is still "live". It appears that unless there is private
funding for continuation of the project, or it is part of a more
major development scheme for the town, Millennium way is, for
probably some considerable time to come to be - A Road To
Nowhere!
The Cache
This is a 3 part multi-cache. The
co-ordinates are for the starting point. The next set of
co-ordinates are contained in each cache, along with the hint, if
you want to use it. 1st container is a camouflaged 2ml vial (he
doesn't bite!). 2nd is a magnetised micro, at the point where My
Dad planned to have a petrol station and 3rd is a micro,
camouflaged in a larger container at the proposed end of the road.
Please bring your own pen, and do not remove the co-ordinate
details from the first two locations.