Road - class 3 togher, Corragarrow, Co. Longford

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Roads & Tracks

Road – class 3 togher, Corragarrow, Co. Longford

In the bogland of Corragarrow, County Longford, a prehistoric trackway lies buried in the peat, running quietly from east-northeast to west-southwest as it has done for centuries.

It belongs to a category of ancient Irish road known as a togher, a term for a wooden causeway or trackway laid across wet or waterlogged ground to allow passage. The practice was widespread in Ireland's boglands, where communities needed reliable routes through terrain that would otherwise have been impassable for much of the year.

This particular togher was noted during a field survey in 1989, and is classified as a class 3 example. The classification system for tогhers reflects differences in construction method and complexity, with some trackways consisting of little more than brushwood laid in a rough line, while others involved carefully arranged planks, pegs, and lateral supports. The survey was carried out with input from archaeologist B. Raftery, one of the foremost scholars of Irish bog roads, whose work helped to establish just how extensive and technically varied this tradition of wetland engineering was across the Irish midlands. The precise age of the Corragarrow togher is not recorded in available documentation, but tогhers in this region range from the Bronze Age through to the medieval period, and the bog itself preserves whatever timber remains with remarkable fidelity, slowing the decay that would obliterate such structures in drier ground.

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