Road - class 2 togher, Corlea, Co. Longford
Co. Longford |
Roads & Tracks
In the boglands of Corlea in County Longford, the ground holds the remains of a road built not from stone or gravel but from brushwood, pressed densely together and laid directly into the wet earth.
This is a togher, the Irish term for a trackway constructed across boggy or marshy ground, and the example recorded here is a modest but telling survival: twenty metres long, just under two and a half metres wide, and preserved to a depth of roughly twenty-eight centimetres beneath the surface.
Corlea is already known in archaeological circles as the site of one of the most significant Iron Age roads ever uncovered in Europe, a great oak-plank trackway dating to 148 BC that now has its own dedicated interpretive centre nearby. This brushwood togher belongs to a different class of construction, simpler in its engineering and likely serving more local or temporary needs. Where the great plank roads required considerable timber resources and organised labour, brushwood toghers could be assembled from whatever scrubby material was at hand, woven and packed together to spread weight across ground that would otherwise swallow a traveller whole. The northeast-to-southwest orientation of this particular example suggests it was threading a deliberate course across the landscape, connecting points that mattered to whoever built and used it, even if those points are no longer recoverable.
