Platform - peatland, Corlea, Co. Longford

Co. Longford |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Platform – peatland, Corlea, Co. Longford

In the boglands around Corlea in County Longford, the peat that preserved so much for so long has also, in places, destroyed it.

A small wooden platform, measuring just 1.3 metres in length and under a metre wide, was found lying on the field surface here, its brushwood and roundwood timbers oriented east to west. A single transverse piece of brushwood to the south brought the exposed width to just over 1.55 metres. It is an unassuming remnant by any measure, yet its very existence points to the way people once moved through, worked in, or lived alongside this saturated landscape.

Corlea is already known to anyone interested in Irish prehistory as the site of a remarkable Iron Age trackway, a great road of oak planks laid across the bog around 148 BC, now partially preserved in a dedicated interpretive centre nearby. Wooden trackways and platforms in bogland were practical solutions to a landscape that was otherwise impassable or difficult to work, and peatland platforms, essentially small raised surfaces of laid timber, were sometimes used as working areas, landing stages, or footholds at the edge of soft ground. The Corlea platform recorded by Dunne in 1999 offers none of the drama of the great road. The remains were badly degraded, having been milled, meaning the peat around them had been mechanically harvested, and there was no evidence of woodworking on the timbers themselves, which makes it impossible to say much about who made it, when, or why. What remains is a trace, a small arrangement of wood that outlasted whoever laid it down, only to be caught at the last moment before the machinery took the rest.

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