Road - class 3 togher, Aghnagore, Co. Longford

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Road – class 3 togher, Aghnagore, Co. Longford

Beneath the bogland of Aghnagore in County Longford, aligned on a north-east to south-west axis, lies the remains of a togher, one of Ireland's most quietly remarkable categories of ancient engineering.

A togher is a timber trackway laid across wet or waterlogged ground, essentially a road built not on firm earth but on bog, allowing people, animals, and goods to cross terrain that would otherwise have been impassable. They range from rough bundles of brushwood to carefully planned constructions of split planks and pegged supports, and they can date anywhere from the Bronze Age to the early medieval period.

The Aghnagore example is classified as a class 3 togher, a designation within a typological system developed to categorise the structural complexity and construction methods of these bog roads. It was recorded during a field survey in 1989, with its orientation noted by archaeologist B. Raftery, whose work on Irish trackways did much to establish how systematically and widely these structures were used across the Irish midlands. The presence of such a feature in this part of Longford is not surprising given the county's extensive boglands, which have preserved organic material for millennia, but each new identification adds another point to what is becoming a remarkably dense map of ancient movement across the wetlands.

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