Road - class 3 togher, Derryglogher, Co. Longford

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Roads & Tracks

Road – class 3 togher, Derryglogher, Co. Longford

Beneath the bogland of Derryglogher in County Longford, a ancient road lies preserved in the waterlogged peat, oriented along a north-north-east to south-south-west line, pointing across terrain that has swallowed most traces of the people who once crossed it.

It is a togher, the Irish term for a timber trackway or road built across boggy ground, and the fact that one exists here at all is a quiet reminder that what looks like empty, impassable landscape was once threaded with routes people needed to follow.

This particular togher is classed as a class 3 example, a designation that refers to its construction method. Class 3 toghers are generally less elaborate than the great prehistoric trackways found elsewhere in the Irish midlands, such as the famed Iron Age roads of Corlea, also in Longford, which used heavy oak planks laid transversely across timber rails. A class 3 construction typically involves a simpler arrangement, often using brushwood, light timbers, or peat sods laid to provide a passable surface. The Derryglogher togher was noted during a field survey in 1988, its orientation recorded through personal communication from B. Raftery, one of the leading scholars of Irish bog roads, whose work across the midland bogs documented dozens of such features before drainage and cutting could erase them entirely. The Irish midlands preserve an unusual concentration of these routes because the anaerobic, acidic conditions of raised bog inhibit decay, holding organic material in a state of suspension that can last for thousands of years.

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