Road - class 2 togher, Killaderry, Co. Galway

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Roads & Tracks

Road – class 2 togher, Killaderry, Co. Galway

Beneath the boglands of Killaderry in County Galway lies a togher, a type of ancient trackway built from timber and brushwood to allow people and animals to cross otherwise impassable wetland.

This particular example is classified as a class 2 togher, a designation that refers to its construction method, typically involving longitudinal planks or split timber laid along the line of travel, sometimes supported by pegs or transverse runners beneath. These structures are remarkable survivals. Ordinarily, wood rots within decades, but the waterlogged, oxygen-poor conditions of an Irish bog can preserve organic material for thousands of years, sometimes keeping the original timber in a state that still smells faintly of resin when it is first exposed to air.

Togher building in Ireland spans an enormous stretch of time. The oldest known examples date to the Neolithic period, while others were constructed well into the early medieval era, and they represent a quiet but significant form of landscape engineering. The effort required to fell, transport, and lay timber across a living bog was considerable, which suggests that these routes mattered, connecting settlements, grazing grounds, or ritual sites that would otherwise have been cut off seasonally or permanently. Killaderry, like much of the Galway lowlands, sits within a region where blanket and raised bogs once covered vast areas, and toghers were part of how communities moved through and made use of that terrain. Without more specific excavation data or dating for this particular trackway, it is difficult to say precisely when the Killaderry togher was built or by whom, but its classification places it within a well-documented tradition of wetland road-making that archaeologists have traced across many Irish counties.

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