Road - class 3 togher, Derrymany, Co. Longford
Co. Longford |
Roads & Tracks
Beneath the bogland of Derrymany in County Longford, a narrow wooden road lies preserved in the waterlogged peat, still roughly pointing north-north-east to south-south-west as it did when it was first laid down.
This is a togher, a type of ancient trackway built across soft or marshy ground using timber, allowing people and animals to cross terrain that would otherwise have been impassable. This particular example is modest in scale, at least 1.3 metres wide and around 10 centimetres deep at minimum, constructed from longitudinal roundwood laid alongside brushwood of birch and hazel. The combination of materials is typical of the craft involved: roundwood provided the structural spine, while flexible brushwood filled and stabilised the surface underfoot.
When the togher was recorded, the remains of a wooden artefact were found lying in association with it, catalogued as 92E148:2. The proximity of the two finds suggests the object may have been lost, discarded, or deposited near the trackway while it was still in use, though what exactly the artefact was is not recorded. Both the togher and the artefact had sustained damage from machinery before they could be fully examined, a fate that has befallen a great many wetland sites across Ireland as drainage and agricultural work cuts through layers of peat that had been quietly preserving organic material for centuries. Bogs are unusual archaeological environments precisely because their cold, acidic, and oxygen-poor conditions can keep wood, leather, and other organic matter intact long after such materials would have rotted away in drier ground.