Road - class 3 togher, Inchirourke, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Roads & Tracks
Beneath the flat bogland of Inchirourke in County Tipperary lie the remains of an ancient wooden road, the kind of structure that only survives because of the very conditions that make the landscape seem so inhospitable.
Bogs preserve organic material with unusual fidelity, and it is precisely this quality that kept a clutch of worked timbers intact long after every surface trace of the structure vanished.
What was found here is classified as a togher, the Irish term for a wooden trackway or causeway laid across boggy ground to allow passage where the earth would otherwise swallow a traveller whole. In 1995, researchers from the Irish Archaeological Wetland Unit at University College Dublin were conducting a pilot survey of the Littleton Works area when they came across a deposit of two roundwood timbers along with additional worked wood. The timbers measured roughly four metres in length and around twenty-five centimetres in diameter. It was a modest find in physical terms, but togher remains of any kind are rare enough to matter. The effort involved in felling, shaping, and laying timber across open bog speaks to how seriously people in the past took the problem of movement through this landscape, and how organised communities had to be to solve it.
