Road - class 1 togher, Corralanna, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Roads & Tracks
Beneath the surface of Coolnagun bog in the Westmeath townland of Corralanna, oak planks lie buried under more than a metre of peat, their purpose still not entirely clear.
They came to light not through deliberate excavation but through an industrial accident of sorts: Bord na Móna, while dredging a drain running east to west across the bog, cut through whatever structure these timbers belong to and exposed them in the drain's northern face. A togher, as these bog roads are known in Ireland, is essentially a raised or laid trackway built from timber to allow passage across otherwise impassable wetland. But whether this is straightforwardly a togher, or something else entirely, remains an open question.
The exposed timbers consist of horizontal oak planks resting on top of smaller brushwood timbers, a construction method consistent with plank-laid trackways found elsewhere in the Irish midlands. The planks that have been pulled out of the drain measure roughly 0.17 metres wide and 0.05 metres thick, and they were sitting approximately 1.3 to 1.6 metres below the bog surface when uncovered. On the southern face of the same drain, a line of small upright roundwoods was observed, which may represent timber pegs used to fix the planks in position. One visible timber in the northern face, measuring around 0.8 metres in length, suggests the structure may have run on a north to south axis, though the orientation is uncertain. What complicates any simple identification as a trackway is the spread of timbers across a length of roughly 70 metres of drain, which raises the possibility that they are the remnants of a broader peatland structure rather than a straightforward road through the bog. A second trackway lies approximately one kilometre to the east, and the site sits around 80 metres north of a tributary of the River Inny, a detail that may or may not be relevant to understanding what was being crossed or connected. The site lies on the southern edge of a Bord na Móna bog that borders Coillte-owned forestry land, a landscape that has been shaped as much by twentieth-century industry as by anything older.
