Road - class 3 togher, Annaghbeg, Co. Longford
Co. Longford |
Roads & Tracks
Beneath the bogland of Annaghbeg in County Longford, a prehistoric road lies buried along an east-west line, largely undisturbed and largely unvisited.
It belongs to a category of ancient trackway known in Irish as a togher, essentially a wooden causeway or road laid across waterlogged or boggy ground to allow passage where the terrain would otherwise make travel impossible. These structures were built by laying split or round timbers flat across the soft ground, sometimes in elaborate arrangements, sometimes as simple brushwood bundles, all eventually preserved by the anaerobic conditions of the bog itself.
This particular togher was recorded during a field survey in 1988 and is classified as a class 3 example, a designation used in the systematic study of Irish bog roads to indicate the construction type and complexity. It was documented by Barry Raftery, the archaeologist whose work on Irish trackways and wetland archaeology brought serious scholarly attention to these often-overlooked monuments, and published in 1990. The site at Annaghbeg offers no dramatic visible feature above the surface, which is precisely what makes it easy to overlook and, in another sense, what makes it survive at all.