Road - class 1 togher, Globeisland, Co. Kildare

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Road – class 1 togher, Globeisland, Co. Kildare

Somewhere beneath a Co. Kildare bog, about 1.5 metres below the surface, lies a road that nobody has properly walked for roughly a thousand years. Locals have long called it the Dane's Road, a name that almost certainly misattributes its origins, as such folk names across Ireland tend to attach Viking or Danish identity to anything ancient and unexplained. In reality, this is a togher, a type of wooden trackway laid across soft or waterlogged ground to allow passage, and the radiocarbon evidence places its construction firmly in the late early-medieval period, between AD 984 and 1023.

When investigators examined surviving sections of the eastern portion in the early 1960s, they found a road built with considerable care. At most points the togher consisted of roughly five longitudinal beams, two of oak and three of alder, each between 15 and 20 centimetres in diameter, held in position by wooden pegs of oak, alder, and ash. In one area, transverse beams were laid over the longitudinals and the whole thing was topped with brushwood, giving a finished width of between 1.3 and 1.5 metres. At another point the structure was brushwood alone. The full trackway is estimated to have once stretched approximately 1,300 metres across the bog in an east-west direction, and local tradition holds that it connected the Cistercian monastery at Monasterevin to a graveyard in Oghil to the east, though the monastery itself post-dates the togher's construction by at least a century, which complicates that account somewhat. The western section of the ridge also appears to have served as a townland boundary between Globeisland, also known as Cloncarlin, and Clonegath. Among the details recorded during investigation is a local report that a skeleton was discovered lying on the togher around 1942, a detail noted without further elaboration, which is itself a quietly unsettling thing to leave hanging.

Peat cutting has removed much of the trackway, and the western end has been planted in forestry, since clear-felled. Portions may survive at the extreme eastern end and at a point roughly 250 metres west of it, where short stretches of uncut turf banks, standing two to two and a half metres high, still remain. Whether any further timber lies preserved beneath them is an open question.

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