Road - class 3 togher, Derrynagran, Co. Longford
Co. Longford |
Roads & Tracks
In the boglands of Derrynagran in County Longford, there survives the trace of a road that was never meant to last and somehow did.
It is barely wider than a person's shoulders, roughly 64 centimetres across and only 13 centimetres deep, yet it represents a significant feat of early engineering: a togher, the Irish term for a timber trackway laid across wet or unstable ground to allow people, animals, or goods to pass where the land would otherwise swallow them.
This particular togher is classed as a class 3 example, meaning it was built using longitudinal roundwood, that is, thin poles laid lengthways along the direction of travel rather than across it. The timber used was alder and hazel, both common in wet woodland environments and both well suited to the conditions. The poles averaged around seven centimetres in diameter, modest materials pressed into practical service. The trackway runs east to west, a orientation that may reflect a connection between two points in the landscape that were meaningful to the people who built it, though what those points were is no longer recoverable from what remains. Bogs have a remarkable preserving quality, holding organic material in their acidic, oxygen-poor layers in ways that dry ground cannot, which is why such wooden roads survive at all.