Road - class 3 togher, Cloonbreany, Co. Longford

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Roads & Tracks

Road – class 3 togher, Cloonbreany, Co. Longford

In the boglands of Cloonbreany, County Longford, there lies the remains of a road that was never meant to last, yet has outlasted almost everything around it.

It is a togher, the Irish term for a timber trackway laid across waterlogged or boggy ground, and this particular example is about as elemental as such structures get: a narrow strip of roundwood poles and brushwood, predominantly birch, pressed into the soft ground and orientated east to west across terrain that would otherwise have been impassable.

The togher measures roughly 1.2 metres in width and sits at a depth of about 0.15 metres, which places it in the class 3 category of these structures, indicating a fairly rudimentary construction rather than the more elaborate arrangements of split planks or mortised beams found at higher-status sites. The materials tell their own quiet story. Birch was a practical, readily available timber, fast-growing and well suited to being cut as roundwood, and the use of brushwood alongside the longitudinal poles suggests a builder working efficiently with what the surrounding landscape offered. Tógher construction in Ireland spans thousands of years, from the Neolithic period well into the medieval era, and the bogs that once made such roads necessary have since preserved them with remarkable fidelity. The research underlying this find was carried out by the Irish Archaeological Wetland Unit at University College Dublin, a project that systematically documented bogland archaeology across the Irish midlands before much of it was lost to turf cutting and drainage.

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