Road - class 2 togher, Cloonfore, Co. Longford
Co. Longford |
Roads & Tracks
In a field in Cloonfore, County Longford, the remains of an ancient road were discovered not in a bog cutting or an archaeological trench, but simply lying on the surface of the ground, slowly being chewed apart by a milling machine.
The road in question is a togher, a type of trackway built from timber and brushwood to allow passage across wet or waterlogged ground, and this one survived precisely because of a small accident of local topography: two adjoining fields sat at a slightly higher elevation than those on either side, and that modest difference in level was enough to protect the structure where similar remains elsewhere had long since vanished.
When archaeologists recorded it, the togher measured at least 23 metres in exposed length and between 1.1 and 1.25 metres wide, running on a roughly west-north-west to east-south-east alignment across the fields. Its construction followed a method well attested in Irish wetland archaeology: densely packed brushwood and twigs, mostly laid longitudinally along the line of travel, with occasional transverse pieces to stabilise the surface, and short pegs of brushwood and twig driven in to hold the whole assembly together. Over one section, a woven hurdle panel, essentially a portable length of interlaced rods, had been laid flat, either as a repair or as additional reinforcement underfoot. Perhaps the most telling detail came from a single large transverse roundwood, nearly four metres long, found at one of the recorded points along the route. Its southern end had been shaped to a chisel point, and that end showed signs of having been split before being placed in position, a small piece of deliberate carpentry from an era in which the engineering of a bog road involved careful, practised handiwork rather than anything casual or improvised.