Road - class 1 togher, Corragarrow, Co. Longford

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Roads & Tracks

Road – class 1 togher, Corragarrow, Co. Longford

Buried beneath the bogland of Corragarrow in County Longford, a wooden road has been quietly disintegrating for nearly three thousand years.

A togher is a timber trackway laid across soft or waterlogged ground, a practical engineering solution that Irish communities returned to again and again across the centuries. The Corragarrow example is rather more substantial than the term might suggest: it originally ran for 135 metres across nine fields, ranging between 1.4 and 3.9 metres in width, and survived to a depth of up to 0.85 metres below the field surface.

When the togher was first recorded, peat milling in the area was already eating into it, yet enough remained to reveal a carefully layered structure. The upper, transverse layer consisted of large planks up to 2.5 metres long, alongside split timbers, roundwood, and brushwood. Beneath that, a longitudinal east-west substructure of roundwood, brushwood, and split timbers formed the foundation. Some of the brushwood had been laid in a fairly random fashion, and traces of bark survived between the rods. Dozens of small wooden pegs, some with well-preserved worked ends, held elements in place, and a flat stone had been incorporated into the surface. Excavation in 2002 pushed the story considerably further back: dendrochronological analysis dated the togher's construction to 900-905 BC, placing it firmly in the Bronze Age. The same excavation showed that the longitudinal roundwood of the substructure was stabilised by a line of outer posts, a detail that speaks to a deliberate and reasonably sophisticated approach to building across unstable ground. That someone, nearly three millennia ago, went to the considerable trouble of splitting timber, sharpening pegs, and laying planks across a Longford bog in order to make a reliable crossing gives the site a quietly arresting quality that measurements alone cannot quite capture.

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