Road - class 3 togher, Cloonbreany, Co. Longford
Co. Longford |
Roads & Tracks
Buried in the bogland of Cloonbreany in County Longford lies the preserved skeleton of an ancient road, one narrow enough that two people could not walk it side by side.
This is a togher, a type of wooden trackway laid across wet or marshy ground to allow passage where the land would otherwise swallow a traveller whole. The Irish boglands preserve such structures with uncanny fidelity, sealing timber in cold, acidic, oxygen-poor conditions that can hold wood intact for centuries or even millennia.
This particular example is classified as a class 3 togher, meaning it was built using longitudinal planks, here of oak, laid lengthways along the direction of travel and supported underneath by transverse timbers pegged into place. It runs east to west, is approximately half a metre wide, and survives to a minimum depth of five centimetres, though the true extent of the deposit may run deeper. The oak construction points to considerable effort: oak is dense and durable, not a timber chosen casually, and the use of pegs to anchor the transverse supports suggests a degree of carpentry know-how rather than simple log-throwing across a wet patch. Toghers like this one connected communities, fields, and resources across landscapes that would otherwise have been seasonally or permanently impassable, and they appear across the Irish midlands wherever the bog has been closely examined.
