Road - class 1 togher, Longfordpass, Co. Tipperary

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Road – class 1 togher, Longfordpass, Co. Tipperary

Beneath the surface of Littleton Bog in County Tipperary, a ninety-metre road made of wood has been lying in the dark for an unknown span of centuries.

It does not appear on any tourist map, and the bog itself gives little away at the surface. But the structure is real enough: a togher, which is the Irish term for a timber trackway laid across waterlogged or boggy ground to allow passage, recorded at five separate points across the northern corner of the bog during survey work in 2006.

The togher at Longfordpass is classed as a class 1 structure, meaning it is composed of longitudinally laid roundwood and brushwood elements rather than the more elaborate plank or split-timber construction seen in some other examples. It runs east to west, and its construction is notably uneven along its length. The western end is sparsely laid, while the eastern sections are considerably more dense in their timber arrangement, suggesting either different phases of construction, different degrees of preservation, or a practical response to varying ground conditions underfoot. Its width ranges from just a tenth of a metre to nearly four metres, and it sits between twelve and forty-two centimetres below the present bog surface. No dating evidence was recovered, so it cannot be assigned to any particular period. What the survey did note is that it lies in close proximity to a high density of other archaeological features within the bog, which hints at a landscape that was once actively used and crossed by people who found the wetland a problem worth solving.

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Pete F
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