Road - togher, Killoran, Co. Tipperary

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Roads & Tracks

Road – togher, Killoran, Co. Tipperary

Preserved beneath the surface of Derryville Bog in County Tipperary lies a concentration of ancient trackways so dense it amounts to a kind of sunken road network.

Twenty-nine toghers, counting possible examples, were recorded in Killoran townland alone. A togher is a bog road, typically built from timber or brushwood laid across waterlogged ground to allow people and animals to cross terrain that would otherwise be impassable, and the cluster at Killoran is a reminder that what looks like empty bogland today was once a routeway through a managed, inhabited landscape.

A field survey carried out by Gowen in 1999 documented the variety of construction methods used across the site. Fifteen of the toghers were made from brushwood alone, while the rest combined brushwood with roundwood timber. Three showed evidence of pegs or stakes driven into the ground to hold the structure in place. Wood species were identified in thirteen of the toghers, with ash and hazel the most common, though alder, birch, elm, holly, and mountain ash were also present, suggesting builders were selecting from whatever grew nearby or was most readily worked. One togher, recorded as TN036-050164, yielded a radiocarbon date placing it in the early medieval period, somewhere between AD 1024 and 1162, which gives a human timestamp to at least part of this network: people were crossing this bog during the century that followed the Viking age and preceded the Norman arrival in Ireland.

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