Road - class 1 togher, Islands, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Roads & Tracks
Buried beneath bogland on the Kilkenny-Tipperary border lies a road that has not seen open air in centuries.
It is a togher, the Irish term for a trackway laid across wet or marshy ground, and this particular example stretches for 712 metres, running east to west through the bog at Islands, Co. Kilkenny, before crossing the county boundary into Tipperary where it continues as a separately recorded monument. At roughly 1.4 metres wide and just 26 centimetres deep, it is a modest construction by any measure, yet the engineering logic behind it is precise: planks, roundwood, and brushwood were laid together to distribute weight across ground that would otherwise swallow a traveller whole.
The togher came to light in 1995, when the Irish Archaeological Wetland Unit, based at University College Dublin, carried out a pilot survey of the Littleton Works. Bog surveys of this kind often produce remarkable finds because peat preserves organic material that would rot away in ordinary soil, meaning timber roadways that might date back thousands of years can survive in extraordinary condition. The Littleton area sits within the broader midland boglands that have yielded some of Ireland's most significant wetland archaeology. What makes this togher particularly interesting is its variation in composition along its length, suggesting it may have been laid in stages, repaired over time, or built by different hands working from either end, though the precise chronology of this stretch has not been specified in what is currently known about it. Its continuation into Tipperary as a recorded monument in its own right underlines that county boundaries mean nothing to an ancient road.
