Road - road/trackway, Curraghmoghaun, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Roads & Tracks
In the townland of Curraghmoghaun in County Clare, a road or trackway has been recorded as an archaeological monument, which is to say it is old enough, or unusual enough in its character, to be considered part of the built or engineered past rather than simply a route people happen to use.
That distinction matters more than it might initially seem. Roads and trackways rarely attract the same attention as hillforts or burial mounds, yet they are often among the most revealing features in a landscape, tracing the logic of how people moved, traded, and organised territory across centuries.
Curraghmoghaun is a townland that carries some archaeological weight in Clare. It lies in the south of the county, in an area where the landscape retains traces of prehistoric and early medieval activity. The name itself derives from the Irish, broadly suggesting a boggy or marshy plain, the kind of terrain where ancient trackways, sometimes called toghers, were constructed from timber and brushwood to allow passage across wet ground. A togher, in essence, is a causeway laid down through difficult terrain, and some Irish examples have been dated to the Bronze Age or earlier. Whether the Curraghmoghaun trackway is of that character, or whether it represents a later routeway worn into drier ground, is not clear from what survives in the record.