The greenway across the bog
The 3.1km Ballyforan Greenway opened on 25 April 2025 on ground that spent decades as a Bord na Móna peat works. It runs as a flat gravel loop through the 250-acre Derryfadda Bog, with a 20-space car park at the trailhead off the L3406, no barrier, no fee and no closing time beyond daylight. If you have half an hour in Ballyforan, this is what to do with it – and it works better on a bike than on foot, since the loop is short for a walk but a decent spin.
Be clear about what you’re looking at, though. This is a bog in the first years of recovery, not a finished parkland. Pools, sedge and heather are creeping back across the old cutaway, and on a grey day the appeal is the quiet and the wide Midlands sky rather than any big view. The gravel drains well but turns slippery after heavy rain, so wear proper boots.
The €1 million project was 85% funded by the Just Transition Fund, with the rest raised locally by the Ballyforan Area Transition Team, a community group formed in 2020 to push it through. That local effort is the real story: a small village turning a worked-out bog into something people drive out to use.
The village
Ballyforan sits on the R363 between Ballygar and Dysart, on the Roscommon bank of the River Suck, which forms the boundary with Galway. The grey stone bridge across the Suck dates to around 1820. It’s a working village rather than a tourist one: a post office, a grocery shop, a pub, a health centre, a community centre, and GAA and snooker clubs. St Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church, built in 1857, is the main landmark, plain and solid in the way of rural mid-19th-century churches. The national school had about 60 pupils at the start of the decade.
The name is older than any of it. Béal Átha Feorainne means ‘approach to the ford at the grassy riverside’, and the place first appears in the Annals of Connacht in 1236 – the ford, long before the bridge.
Local pride attaches to Jack McQuillan, born here, who won two All-Ireland Senior Football Championships with Roscommon and then sat as a Teachta Dála from 1948 to 1965.
Getting there and practical notes
You’ll want a car. Ballyforan is about 20 minutes’ drive from Roscommon town; public transport amounts to one bus a week (Fridays, roughly 52 minutes from Roscommon). During National Heritage Week in late August, local volunteers run a guided ecology and heritage walk on the bog – the best time to have the ground explained rather than guessed at.
The greenway needs no booking and stays open year-round in daylight; it’s unlit, so keep it to a daytime outing. If you’re building a longer loop by car, Athleague lies a short way north on the same River Suck, with its own castle ruins and a stretch of river to walk.