Road - class 1 togher, Mayne, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Roads & Tracks

Road – class 1 togher, Mayne, Co. Westmeath

Preserved beneath the surface of Mayne bog in County Westmeath lies a wooden road that nobody was specifically looking for.

In 2006, during excavation of a known bog road, or togher, a second structure emerged at the same depth. It had been there all along, running east to west through the peat, quietly parallel to its more expected neighbour.

A togher is a trackway built from timber and laid across boggy or waterlogged ground, a low-tech but effective solution to terrain that would otherwise be impassable. The one uncovered at Mayne is classified as a class 1 togher, constructed mainly from brushwood laid lengthways along the direction of travel. At 383 metres long, it is a substantial structure, and its varying width, between 1.3 metres and 2.9 metres at different points, suggests either changes in the ground conditions it was crossing or adaptations made during construction or repair. That two tochers existed in the same stretch of bog, recorded at the same level, raises the possibility that this was a corridor of movement through the landscape rather than a single crossing point.

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