Road - togher, Corlea, Co. Longford

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Roads & Tracks

Road – togher, Corlea, Co. Longford

In a field near Corlea in County Longford, a small cluster of ancient timber survived long enough to be recorded, though only just.

Up to five parallel roundwoods, the raw, unworked poles used in the construction of a togher, lay exposed on the field surface across a stretch roughly one and a half metres long and less than a metre wide. A togher is a timber trackway, typically laid across bogland to allow people or animals to cross otherwise impassable ground, and Corlea is already well known for one of the most remarkable examples ever found in Ireland, a vast Iron Age road of oak planks now partially preserved in a purpose-built interpretive centre nearby. This fragment is something else entirely, quieter and considerably more battered.

When documented by Dunne in 1999, the timbers were badly degraded, the result of milling activity in the area. There was no visible evidence of woodworking on the roundwoods, meaning they appear to have been laid essentially as they were cut, without shaping or jointing. The remains were also visible in the eastern face of a nearby drain, suggesting that more of the structure may lie beneath the surrounding ground, or may once have done so before drainage and peat extraction took their toll. The absence of worked surfaces makes precise dating or typological classification difficult, but the parallel arrangement of the poles is consistent with togher construction found elsewhere in the Irish midlands, where bog roads were a practical necessity for communities living alongside and within wetland landscapes for thousands of years.

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