Road - class 3 togher, Cloonbreany, Co. Longford

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Roads & Tracks

Road – class 3 togher, Cloonbreany, Co. Longford

In the bogland of Cloonbreany, County Longford, the ground conceals what was once a deliberate act of engineering: a road laid across wet, unstable terrain using nothing more than hazel and birch.

It is not a dramatic structure, but that is rather the point. This is infrastructure in its most elemental form, a quiet solution to the problem of moving through a landscape that would otherwise swallow you whole.

The feature is a togher, a word from the Irish tóchar, referring to a causeway or trackway built across boggy ground. This particular example is classed as a class 3 togher, meaning it was constructed from longitudinal roundwood, essentially unsplit timber laid lengthwise along the direction of travel, combined with brushwood for additional support and surface. The whole thing runs east to west, measures 2.4 metres wide and approximately 0.15 metres deep, and is made entirely of hazel and birch, two of the more common and workable native Irish woodland species. Toghers like this one were built and used throughout prehistoric and early medieval Ireland, and the boglands of the Irish Midlands have preserved extraordinary numbers of them, the acidic, waterlogged conditions preventing the decay that would have erased them anywhere else. The sheer ordinariness of this togher is part of what makes it interesting: it was not a monument, not a ceremonial structure, just a road that someone needed to exist.

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