Road - class 1 togher, Derryvella, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Roads & Tracks
Buried within the Littleton Bog complex in County Tipperary lies the remains of a carefully engineered wooden road, laid across waterlogged ground to connect a cluster of early medieval sites that would otherwise have been effectively isolated from one another.
A togher, as such a bog road is known in Irish archaeology, is a construction built to allow passage over terrain that would swallow an unassisted traveller. This particular example stretches at least 247 metres on a roughly east-west alignment, and at four metres wide it was no mere footpath.
The engineering behind it is more considered than a simple layer of planks thrown across mud. The upper surface is composed of closely laid transverse oak timbers, each up to 2.5 metres long and around six to eight centimetres deep, set side by side like a wide, flat deck. Below these sits a substructure of longitudinal runners, a mix of shaped planks and roundwood timbers, with a layer of brown, gritty, silty clay worked into the base to add stability and distribute weight. The togher appears to have served a practical purpose in connecting an ecclesiastical enclosure on one side of the bog with a church and graveyard situated on a dryland island to the west, while a possible ringfort and enclosure lay on the north-eastern edge. The picture that emerges is of a small, organised early Christian community that had established itself across this fragmented boggy landscape and needed reliable passage between its component parts. Across its length the road is not uniformly preserved; machinery has disturbed sections, leaving some stretches fragmentary and others missing entirely, though where it does survive the construction remains consistent.