Road - class 2 togher, Cloonbreany, Co. Longford

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Roads & Tracks

Road – class 2 togher, Cloonbreany, Co. Longford

Preserved beneath the bogland of County Longford, near Cloonbreany, lies a section of ancient roadway that was already centuries old before the Iron Age began.

A togher is a timber trackway laid across wet or boggy ground, essentially an engineered path built to carry people and animals safely over terrain that would otherwise have been impassable. This particular example stretches some 220 metres in length, is roughly 1.25 metres wide, and survives to a depth of around 25 centimetres, making it a substantial piece of prehistoric infrastructure by any measure.

The construction method is precise and deliberate. Two layers of longitudinal brushwood and roundwood, timber running along the direction of travel, were laid with transverse roundwoods sandwiched between them, the whole assembly pegged at its edges to keep it in place. The trackway runs on an east-northeast to west-southwest orientation. Radiocarbon dating places its construction somewhere between 1366 and 1052 BC, deep in the Irish Bronze Age, a period when the midland bogs were criss-crossed by dozens of such engineered routes connecting communities, farmsteads, and grazing grounds. The togher was first recorded in 1986, and the dating and structural analysis were carried out by Professor Barry Raftery, whose work on Irish bog roads, including the nearby and more famous Corlea Trackway, transformed understanding of prehistoric mobility and woodland management in Ireland. This site is catalogued as Corlea 2 in Raftery's published research, placing it within a broader network of wetland roads concentrated in this part of Longford.

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