Road - class 2 togher, Derryoghil, Co. Longford

Co. Longford |

Roads & Tracks

Road – class 2 togher, Derryoghil, Co. Longford

Beneath the worked-over bogland of Derryoghil in County Longford, a narrow wooden road once carried people across ground that would otherwise have swallowed them.

It came to light when milling of the bog surface exposed three separate stretches of ancient timber laid out along an east-north-east to west-south-west line, the whole structure measuring around twenty metres in length and just under two metres wide.

What was uncovered is classified as a togher, the Irish term for a trackway built across wet or boggy terrain, typically using timber, brushwood, or both. This particular example belongs to a class of construction in which bundles of longitudinal brushwood, ranging from roughly one and a half to five centimetres in diameter, were laid alongside small roundwood pieces of up to nine centimetres across. The three exposed sections were slightly offset from one another rather than forming a single unbroken line, but their shared construction method suggests they were once part of the same continuous path. Bogs preserve timber with remarkable fidelity, and toghers of this kind can survive for centuries or even millennia in the anaerobic conditions beneath the peat, emerging only when that peat is removed by industrial cutting.

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