Road - class 3 togher, Annaghbeg, Co. Longford

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Roads & Tracks

Road – class 3 togher, Annaghbeg, Co. Longford

Beneath the bogland of Annaghbeg in County Longford, there is a road that has not carried a traveller in a very long time.

It is a togher, a type of ancient trackway built from timber and other organic material laid across waterlogged or unstable ground to make passage possible where it would otherwise be treacherous. These structures are among the more quietly remarkable things the Irish midland bogs have preserved, holding their shape for centuries or millennia in conditions that would destroy them almost anywhere else.

This particular togher falls into what archaeologists classify as a class 3 example, a designation that relates to its method of construction within a broader typology of Irish bog roads. It was recorded during field survey work in 1988 and runs on an east to west orientation, a detail that occasionally carries significance in terms of settlement patterns or the destinations a route was meant to connect, though the immediate landscape context here is the bog itself. The reference citation attached to it, Raftery 1990, points to the work of Barry Raftery, whose research into Irish bog roads and prehistoric trackways did much to establish how these features are identified, categorised, and understood. The source of the field data was the Irish Archaeological Wetland Unit, based at University College Dublin, which undertook systematic survey of Irish bogland to document exactly these kinds of low-visibility but archaeologically important features before drainage or cutting could remove them from the record entirely.

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