Road - class 2 togher, Ballybeg, Co. Tipperary

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Roads & Tracks

Road – class 2 togher, Ballybeg, Co. Tipperary

Beneath the stripped surface of Ballybeg Bog in County Tipperary, a road survives, of a kind.

It was never paved with stone or tarmac, but laid down in timber, piece by piece, across waterlogged ground that would otherwise have been impassable. What remains of it now lies partly exposed across four fields, measuring roughly 60 metres in length and little more than a metre and a half wide, the kind of structure that most people would walk past without recognising it as a road at all.

The feature is a togher, the Irish term for a wooden trackway constructed across bogland, typically by laying roundwood poles and brushwood in a combination of longitudinal and transverse arrangements to distribute weight and create a stable surface. The Ballybeg example was documented during a peatland survey carried out in 2006 by Archaeological Development Services, with findings reported by Whitaker. It runs roughly northeast to southwest and sits on the northern side of Ballybeg Bog, precisely at the point where the bog narrows and approaches dry ground, which tells you something about the practical thinking behind its placement. Someone was trying to cross a wet obstacle by the shortest available route. The construction itself is relatively modest; roundwood elements ranging from 0.3 to 3.5 metres in length, laid in parallel with gaps of five to thirty centimetres between them, resting on a base of well-humified Sphagnum peat mixed with heather root material. Four separate sightings were recorded at intervals of roughly 15 metres along the trackway, each preserving a slightly different glimpse of the original structure. By the time surveyors examined it, prolonged machine cutting across the bog had left the wood cracked, fragmented, and in very poor condition throughout. The togher had already lost most of what it once was.

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