Road - class 3 togher, Derryoghil, Co. Longford

Co. Longford |

Roads & Tracks

Road – class 3 togher, Derryoghil, Co. Longford

Beneath the boglands of Derryoghil in County Longford, there lies a road that nobody has driven, ridden, or walked in roughly three thousand years.

It is a togher, the Irish term for a trackway built across wet or marshy ground, constructed by laying brushwood and roundwood directly into the bog to create a passable surface. The technique is deceptively simple, and in this case it worked well enough that traces of the structure survived into the modern era, albeit in poor condition.

Radiocarbon dating placed the construction of the Derryoghil togher somewhere between 1207 and 922 BC, firmly within the Later Bronze Age. At that period, the Irish midlands were threaded with such routes, many of them crossing the great raised bogs that made overland travel genuinely difficult for much of the year. This particular example ran on a northwest to southeast orientation and showed two distinct construction methods within its excavated length. At the northwest end, brushwood had been laid longitudinally, running in the direction of travel; further east, the builders switched to a transverse substructure, laying branches across the line of the road rather than along it. The excavated portion measured at least 4.75 metres in length and 2.2 metres across, with a depth of around 13 centimetres. When an inspector visited the site in 1999, the brushwood, densely packed and ranging from two to four centimetres in diameter, was in very poor condition, and no evidence of deliberate woodworking was visible on any of the surviving material. By that point, a length of roughly 15 metres could still be traced, though the structure had suffered extensive damage over time, from the bog itself, from cutting, and from the slow mechanical pressure of centuries.

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