Road - class 3 togher, Annaghbeg, Co. Longford
Co. Longford |
Roads & Tracks
Beneath the bogland of Annaghbeg in County Longford lies a road that no wheeled vehicle has used for centuries, if ever.
It is a togher, a type of ancient trackway built from timber and brushwood laid across wet or waterlogged ground to allow people and animals to cross terrain that would otherwise have been impassable. Tochars of this kind are classified by construction method, and a class 3 togher generally refers to a relatively simple form of the tradition, using laid timbers or other organic material rather than the more elaborate jointed woodwork found in higher-classification examples. The bog preserves what open air would long since have destroyed.
This particular togher was recorded during a field survey in 1988 and runs on a north-east to south-west orientation, a detail that hints at the logic of the people who laid it down, connecting two points across the wetland along a route that made practical sense in its own time. The record draws on the work of Raftery, whose 1990 survey of Irish bog roads documented numerous such features across the Irish midlands, a region where raised bogs once dominated the landscape and tochars were a practical necessity of daily movement. The Irish Archaeological Wetland Unit at University College Dublin was responsible for much of the systematic fieldwork that brought sites like this one to wider attention during the late twentieth century.