Road - togher, Killoran, Co. Tipperary

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Roads & Tracks

Road – togher, Killoran, Co. Tipperary

Beneath the flat bogland at Killoran in County Tipperary, a road was laid down and then simply swallowed.

Not a metalled highway or a cobbled lane, but a togher, the Irish term for a bog road, built from brushwood and split timber and pressed into the soft ground at a time when crossing a bog on foot was a genuine hazard. That it survived at all is down to the remarkable preserving chemistry of waterlogged peat, which can hold organic material for centuries without it fully decaying.

Excavation revealed a wooden trackway running east to west, roughly twenty-four metres long and between two and four metres wide. The construction method was practical and direct: a single layer of longitudinal brushwood and split timbers laid flat, forming a surface solid enough to walk across without sinking. Radiocarbon dating placed its construction somewhere between 394 and 199 BC, which puts it firmly in the Iron Age, a period when bog roads of this kind were being built across Ireland and Britain as a way of moving people, animals, and goods through landscapes that would otherwise have been impassable for much of the year. The Killoran togher is modest in scale compared to some of the great bog roads found elsewhere in the midlands, but it represents the same essential impulse: the need to impose a line of reliable passage across an unreliable surface.

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