Crossing the expanse of Lullymore East bog in County Kildare, three ancient roads run side by side through the peat, invisible to most people who pass near them and yet extraordinarily well preserved beneath the surface. These are toghers, a term for the timber and earthen causeways that early medieval Irish communities built to traverse bogland that would otherwise have been impassable. What makes this particular group unusual is not just their survival but their number: three parallel routes, apparently in use during overlapping or successive periods, quietly threading the same corridor across the bog.

The principal togher stretches roughly 550 metres, orientated roughly north-northeast to south-southwest, connecting the dry land islands of Lullymore to the northeast and Lullybeg to the southwest. At an average width of 4.5 metres, it is a substantial structure by any measure. Its construction follows a layered logic: beneath a surface of gravel lie large timbers running transversely across the route, and beneath those, smaller timbers running lengthways, with what appears to be re-deposited peat forming the base. This kind of engineered sandwich, combining drainage, load distribution, and surface stability, represents considerable communal effort and planning. The togher has been dated to between AD 380 and 660, placing it in the late Roman Iron Age through to the early Christian period in Ireland. It can be traced for most of its length as a raised line of vegetation on the bog surface and is visible in 22 drainage faces cut by Bord na Móna, the state peat company whose industrial harvesting of Irish bogs has, ironically, both threatened and exposed countless archaeological features over the decades. Running parallel to the east are two further toghers, their remains less complete but enough to confirm that this was not a single crossing but a corridor of movement, maintained and perhaps rebuilt across generations.