Road - class 2 togher, Derrynaskea, Co. Longford
Co. Longford |
Roads & Tracks
In the bogland of Derrynaskea, County Longford, a narrow causeway lies preserved beneath the peat, built not from stone but from wood.
This is a togher, an ancient wooden road laid across wet or marshy ground to allow passage where the land would otherwise have been impassable. The example recorded here is modest in scale, forty metres long and just 1.2 metres wide, barely enough for a person to walk comfortably in single file. What it lacks in grandeur it makes up for in specificity: the construction method, longitudinal roundwood laid alongside brushwood cut from ash and birch, tells a quiet story about people who read the landscape carefully and worked with what grew nearest to hand.
Toghers are classified by their method of construction, and this one falls into the class 2 category, meaning it was built using a combination of roundwood runners and brushwood infill rather than, say, split planks or heavier timber trackways. The orientation runs roughly north-west to south-east, suggesting it connected two points of practical significance, perhaps a settlement edge and a grazing area, or a route between two firmer patches of ground. Ash and birch both grow readily in wet marginal habitats, which makes their presence here entirely consistent with a builder using locally available material rather than importing timber from elsewhere. Without a radiocarbon date in the available record, it is difficult to place this togher within a specific period, though wooden trackways of broadly similar construction have been found across Irish boglands dating from the Bronze Age through to the early medieval period.
