Road - class 3 togher, Derryoghil, Co. Longford

Co. Longford |

Roads & Tracks

Road – class 3 togher, Derryoghil, Co. Longford

In the bogland of Derryoghil, County Longford, lies the remains of a road that no living person has ever walked.

It was built sometime between 794 and 541 BC, during the Irish Bronze Age, and it survived not because anyone preserved it but because the wet, anaerobic conditions of the surrounding bog essentially pickled it in place for roughly two and a half thousand years.

The structure belongs to a category known as a togher, the Irish word for a trackway or causeway laid across boggy or waterlogged ground. Builders of such roads typically worked with whatever timber was close to hand, and this one follows a familiar pattern: longitudinal brushwood laid down first as a base, then transverse brushwood and roundwood placed across it to create a walking surface. The whole thing runs northeast to southwest, measures at least 3.5 metres in length and around 2.2 metres wide, and sits at a depth of just nine centimetres, which gives a sense of how close to the surface this ancient infrastructure lies. When it was recorded in 1988, the wood was already heavily degraded, and the radiocarbon date, derived from a sample tested with a result of 2525 plus or minus 25 BP under laboratory reference GrN-16637, places its construction firmly in the late Bronze Age. The findings were published by Barry Raftery in 1996, as part of his broader work cataloguing the remarkable concentration of bog roads found across the Irish midlands.

These midland toghers, of which hundreds have been identified, were not minor local conveniences. They represent organised, communal effort to move people and possibly goods across a landscape that was otherwise largely impassable for much of the year. That a structure this old, this fragile, and this ordinary in its materials should survive at all is one of the quieter curiosities of Irish archaeology.

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