Road - class 2 togher, Pallasboy, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Roads & Tracks
In the industrial peatlands of Toar Bog, County Westmeath, a narrow path of laid branches was quietly swallowed by the bog and preserved there for nearly a thousand years.
What emerged during excavation was a togher, the Irish term for a timber trackway built across waterlogged or boggy ground, constructed from a loose arrangement of alder, ash, birch, hazel, and holly brushwood laid in a roughly northeast-to-southwest direction. It was no grand causeway; at its widest it measured just over two metres, and the total traced length was sixteen metres. But the care taken in its making is legible in the wood itself. Several pieces retained their bark intact, and the ends had been worked with cutting tools into chisel and wedge points, the kind of shaping that speaks to deliberate, practised construction rather than casual timber-dumping.
The trackway first came to light as a sparse surface scatter spotted along a drain edge during the 2013 Re-assessment Peatland Survey. A subsequent excavation, carried out under licence, opened a single cutting into the moderately to well-humified Sphagnum peat in which the structure lay. Sphagnum moss, the dominant plant in raised bogs, creates the acidic, oxygen-poor conditions that make organic preservation possible, which is why wood and leather can survive here when they would long since have rotted elsewhere. A fragment of alder was selected for AMS radiocarbon dating, an accelerator mass spectrometry method that can produce a date from a very small sample, and the result placed the trackway's construction somewhere between cal. AD 1031 and 1155. That puts it squarely in the early medieval period, a time when bogland routes were practical necessities for people and livestock moving across a landscape that was largely impassable without them. A small leather fragment, probably part of a shoe, was found alongside the timber, a quiet detail suggesting that someone once walked this particular path.
