Road - class 2 togher, Derrynagran, Co. Longford

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Roads & Tracks

Road – class 2 togher, Derrynagran, Co. Longford

In the bogland of Derrynagran in County Longford, beneath layers of peat, lies a road that was never meant to last but has survived for centuries regardless.

It is a togher, an ancient trackway built across wet or marshy ground using timber and brushwood, a practical solution to the problem of moving through Ireland's vast boggy interior at a time when such terrain was both an obstacle and a kind of boundary between communities.

This particular togher runs roughly northeast to southwest, measuring twenty-five metres in length and just over three metres wide, with a depth of around a quarter of a metre. It is built from tightly packed hazel and ash brushwood, the individual pieces slender, between two and four centimetres in diameter, laid six layers deep. There is also a possibility that a hurdle, a woven panel of interlaced rods, was incorporated into the structure, which would have added both stability and surface integrity underfoot. Hazel and ash were common choices for this kind of construction across Irish wetlands; both are flexible, relatively resistant to decay in waterlogged conditions, and would have been readily available in the scrubby woodland that bordered many bogs. Toghers of this class, built from brushwood rather than heavier split or round timber, tend to represent modest local crossings rather than major arterial routes, suggesting this one served a community moving through the landscape at a very local scale.

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