Road - class 3 togher, Corlea, Co. Longford

Co. Longford |

Roads & Tracks

Road – class 3 togher, Corlea, Co. Longford

Preserved beneath the boglands of County Longford is a fragment of road so modest in its dimensions that it could easily be mistaken for debris rather than deliberate construction.

Just two metres long and barely eight centimetres deep, it is nonetheless a recognisable piece of ancient infrastructure, laid down with some care by people who needed to move across wet and difficult ground.

The structure is a togher, the Irish term for a trackway built across boggy terrain, typically using timber, brushwood, or other organic material pressed into the soft ground to create a firm surface. This particular example, catalogued among a number of such features at Corlea in County Longford, was constructed from thin hazel rods laid lengthways and packed tightly together, with some foliage incorporated into the surface. It runs on a northeast to southwest orientation and measures 1.6 metres wide. Corlea is already well known for a far larger Iron Age road discovered nearby, a substantial oak trackway dated to 148 BC, but the bog has preserved evidence of many smaller, less celebrated crossings as well. This togher, recorded as Corlea 12 and referenced by the archaeologist Barry Raftery, belongs to that broader pattern of repeated, practical attempts to negotiate the same unforgiving landscape across different periods.

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