Road - class 3 togher, Derrynaskea, Co. Longford

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Roads & Tracks

Road – class 3 togher, Derrynaskea, Co. Longford

Beneath the bogland of Derrynaskea in County Longford, there lies a togher, a type of ancient trackway built across wet or waterlogged ground using timber, brushwood, or other organic material.

What makes tогhers remarkable is the simple fact of their survival: the same anaerobic conditions that make bogs so inhospitable to ordinary travel also preserve wood and other organic matter for centuries, even millennia, locking these engineered pathways in place long after the communities that built them have gone.

The Derrynaskea example is classed as a class 3 togher, a designation that refers to a particular construction type within a broader typology developed to categorise the many trackways identified across Irish wetlands. It was noted during field survey in 1988, with the observation attributed to B. Raftery, a name closely associated with Irish wetland archaeology and the study of bog roads in particular. The site was recorded as part of the work of the Irish Archaeological Wetland Unit, based at University College Dublin, which carried out systematic survey of Ireland's midland bogs during the late twentieth century, a period when turf-cutting and land drainage were exposing, and in many cases destroying, archaeological material that had lain undisturbed for generations. The midland counties, Longford among them, proved especially rich in such discoveries, their low-lying terrain having supported extensive bogland for thousands of years.

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