Road - class 3 togher, Derryoghil, Co. Longford
Co. Longford |
Roads & Tracks
In the bogland of Derryoghil, Co. Longford, there lies the remains of a road that has not carried a traveller for roughly three thousand years.
It is a togher, a term for the timber trackways that Bronze Age and Iron Age communities laid across Ireland's waterlogged midland bogs, threading paths through terrain that would otherwise have been impassable. What makes this particular example quietly remarkable is how ordinary its materials are: hazel rods laid lengthways, covered with a hurdle panel, the whole thing no wider than a doorway and barely a tenth of a metre deep. It is not a monument in any grand sense. It is infrastructure, and it has simply outlasted everything built around it.
Radiocarbon dating placed the togher's construction between 1208 and 923 BC, a range that puts it firmly in the middle to late Bronze Age. The dating was carried out using a sample assigned the laboratory reference GrN-16634, and the result was published by Raftery in 1990 and again in 1996. When the structure was inspected in 1999, the original NNE-SSW orientation recorded at discovery had shifted in description to an overall E-W alignment, and the visible extent had grown to around fifteen metres in length and 1.2 metres in width. By that point, the togher consisted of quite densely packed brushwood, with individual pieces ranging from around two to four centimetres in diameter, alongside roundwood elements, one of which measured eleven centimetres across. Two of these roundwood pieces ran along the centre of the trackway like a spine, perhaps serving as a firmer footing along the most-used line of travel. The hurdle panel noted in earlier records, a section of woven or interlaced wood typical of this type of construction, was by then poorly preserved.
