Road - togher, Killoran, Co. Tipperary

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Roads & Tracks

Road – togher, Killoran, Co. Tipperary

Beneath the flat bogland of Killoran in County Tipperary, roughly three thousand years of wet peat have been doing an excellent job of preserving a road that nobody drove on in any conventional sense.

The structure is a togher, the Irish term for a wooden trackway laid across boggy or waterlogged ground, and what excavation turned up here was modest in scale but remarkable in age: a stretch just seven metres long and three and a half metres wide, constructed from heavy roundwood trunks laid as transverse bearers across a packed mixture of brushwood and some cleft timber.

Radiocarbon dating of an oak timber from the substructure returned a date of 979 BC, plus or minus nine years, placing construction firmly in the Late Bronze Age. That precision is unusual and worth pausing on. The bog, by preserving organic material that would otherwise have rotted away within decades, effectively froze a moment of practical engineering from a period when Ireland's inhabitants were working in bronze rather than iron. What makes the Killoran togher stranger still is its relationship to the ground beneath it. The trackway partially overlies a fulacht fia, a type of site found in enormous numbers across Ireland and typically interpreted as an outdoor cooking place, where water was heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into a trough. Whether the togher was built with any awareness of what lay underneath, or simply because the ground happened to be firmer there, is not something the excavation could resolve. The two features together suggest a stretch of bogland that saw repeated use across time, each generation leaving its own layer in the peat.

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