Road - class 3 togher, Derrynagran, Co. Longford

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Roads & Tracks

Road – class 3 togher, Derrynagran, Co. Longford

In the bogland of Derrynagran, County Longford, a handful of ash poles laid end to end across wet ground constitute one of the quieter survivals of early Irish engineering.

The structure is a togher, a type of ancient trackway built to allow people and animals to cross otherwise impassable boggy terrain, and this particular example is modest even by the standards of its kind: just seven roundwood timbers, spread loosely across a width of roughly one and a half metres, sunk to a depth of less than ten centimetres into the peat.

What the bog preserves, the eye alone would never suspect. The seven longitudinal timbers, all of ash, range from just over six centimetres to just over eleven centimetres in diameter, laid in a northeast to southwest orientation. One of the smaller pieces shows a notably slow growth pattern in comparison with the others, meaning its annual rings are tightly compressed, suggesting it came from a tree that struggled in poor light or thin soil conditions. That detail, recoverable only through close examination of the wood itself, is the kind of quiet biographical trace that wetland archaeology occasionally surfaces. Toghers range considerably in their complexity, from simple brushwood paths to carefully engineered plank roads, and this one sits at the informal end of that spectrum, a class 3 structure, built more from practical necessity than from any great investment of labour or material.

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