Road - class 3 togher, Annaghbeg, Co. Longford

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Roads & Tracks

Road – class 3 togher, Annaghbeg, Co. Longford

Beneath the bogland of Annaghbeg in County Longford, the remnants of a road survive that was already ancient before the first stones of the Egyptian New Kingdom were laid.

What was recovered is modest in scale, a partially excavated hurdle togher running east to west, but the date attached to it is quietly arresting: radiocarbon analysis places its construction somewhere between 2400 and 2155 BC, deep in the Irish Early Bronze Age.

A togher is a trackway laid across wet or boggy ground, typically built from woven rods and stakes pressed into the soft surface to create a passable path. The example at Annaghbeg belongs to the hurdle tradition, in which flexible rods are woven between upright stakes, much like a wattle fence laid flat. When it was noted in 1989, the structure was already extensively damaged, and only a partial excavation was possible. What survived measured at least 2.7 metres in length and around 0.8 metres wide, with a depth of just 0.1 metres. The construction materials were notably robust: the upright sails had a diameter of between 0.04 and 0.045 metres, and the woven rods between 0.02 and 0.03 metres, dimensions described as unusually thick for this type of trackway. That solidity may reflect the demands of the particular stretch of ground being crossed, or simply the preferences and resources of the people who built it. The radiocarbon date of 3830 plus or minus 25 BP was obtained from the timbers themselves, anchoring this otherwise anonymous piece of engineering to a remarkably precise window in prehistory.

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