Road - class 3 togher, Derrymany, Co. Longford
Co. Longford |
Roads & Tracks
In a bog in County Longford, preserved beneath centuries of peat, lies what was once a road.
Not a road in any grand sense, but a togher, one of the ancient timber trackways that Irish communities laid across waterlogged ground to make passage possible where the land offered none. This particular example, recorded at Derrymany, is a class 3 togher, a designation that refers to its construction method: longitudinal rounds of birch wood laid end to end, forming a narrow but purposeful path just over a metre wide and roughly nineteen centimetres deep.
The birch roundwood used here, each piece no more than six and a half centimetres in diameter, speaks to a practical engineering tradition that was widespread across Ireland's midland bogs for thousands of years. Builders chose whatever timber was locally available and worked with the ground rather than against it, pinning or laying wood directly onto the bog surface to create a stable footing across what would otherwise have been impassable marsh. The trackway runs on an east-northeast to west-southwest orientation, suggesting it connected two points of significance in the landscape, though what those points were is not recorded. Toghers of this kind range in age from the Neolithic period through to the early medieval era, and without dendrochronological or radiocarbon dating the precise age of the Derrymany example remains uncertain. The data was gathered by the Irish Archaeological Wetland Unit, a research body based at University College Dublin that systematically surveyed bogland archaeology across the country before much of it was lost to turf cutting and drainage.