Road - togher, Dromerkeen, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Roads & Tracks
At Dromerkeen in County Kerry, a stretch of rough marshy pasture holds the memory of a road that has entirely disappeared from view.
Nothing marks the spot today, no timber, no stone, no raised earthwork, yet local tradition preserves the name: a togher once crossed this marsh, running east to west through ground that would have made ordinary travel difficult or impossible in wet seasons. A togher is a causeway or trackway laid across boggy or waterlogged terrain, typically constructed from timber planks, brushwood, or other organic materials, and examples found elsewhere in Ireland date back thousands of years, some to the Bronze Age or earlier.
What survives at Dromerkeen is not the structure itself but the knowledge of it, passed down through local usage of the word. That the name togher remained attached to this particular crossing long after any physical trace vanished suggests it served as a meaningful route for long enough to lodge in the landscape's memory. The ground here is rough marshy pasture with occasional outcrops of rock breaking the surface, conditions that make plain why a constructed path would have been necessary in the first place, and why the organic materials from which such paths are built rarely survive without the preserving conditions of deep, undisturbed peat.