Road - class 3 togher, Derryglogher, Co. Longford

Co. Longford |

Roads & Tracks

Road – class 3 togher, Derryglogher, Co. Longford

In the bogland of Derryglogher, County Longford, there lies the remains of an ancient trackway that most people would walk straight past without realising the ground beneath them had once been engineered.

This is a togher, a timber road built across wet or waterlogged terrain, and its presence here points to a time when crossing a bog was not simply inconvenient but genuinely dangerous, and required considerable communal effort to solve.

Torghers are classified by their construction method, and a class 3 togher typically consists of split or round timber laid transversely across a foundation of brushwood or peat, forming a corduroy-style surface over ground that would otherwise be impassable. The Derryglogher example was noted during a field survey in 1988, running on a north to south orientation. The observation came through B. Raftery, one of the foremost scholars of Irish wetland archaeology, whose work helped establish just how densely these boglands were once threaded with such roads. Ireland's bogs have proved extraordinary preservers of organic material, and torghers that would have rotted away centuries ago in drier conditions have survived here in remarkable condition, their timbers sometimes still bearing the marks of the tools that shaped them.

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