Road - class 2 togher, Derrylough, Co. Longford
Co. Longford |
Roads & Tracks
Beneath the boggy ground of Derrylough in County Longford, a road has been quietly disintegrating for more than two thousand years.
It is a togher, the Irish term for a trackway built across wet or marshy ground, typically constructed from timber laid directly into the bog. What makes this one quietly arresting is how it was found: not through careful excavation but simply by looking at the surface, where, as late as 1999, a faint band of wood chips was still traceable across six open fields, the upper remnants of something that had once carried Iron Age travellers from one dry patch of land to another.
The trackway runs roughly east-south-east to west-north-west, stretching 110 metres in length and just 1.4 metres wide, narrow enough that two people would have struggled to pass each other. It was first formally recorded in 1991, and when inspected in 1999, archaeologists noted that while the upper surface had degraded, portions beneath ground level appeared to survive intact. The construction method was methodical: closely laid longitudinal roundwood formed the spine of the road, packed with brushwood and twigs, with some transverse elements placed at an angle of roughly 30 to 40 degrees to the main timbers, a technique that would have helped distribute weight across unstable ground. Excavation in 2001 brought the structure into much sharper focus. Radiocarbon dating placed its construction somewhere between 377 and 264 BC, firmly within the Iron Age, and analysis of the wood identified hazel as the dominant material, with smaller quantities of hawthorn, birch, and ash. These were not exotic or imported timbers; they were the hedgerow and scrub species of the local landscape, cut and laid by people who knew the ground and knew what it demanded of them.