Road - class 3 togher, Annaghbeg, Co. Longford

Co. Longford |

Roads & Tracks

Road – class 3 togher, Annaghbeg, Co. Longford

In a field at Annaghbeg in County Longford, a drainage ditch exposed something that had been lying quietly in the ground for an unknown length of time: a narrow band of carefully laid timber, invisible from the surface, preserved in the wet earth beneath a field that sat slightly higher than those around it.

This is a togher, a type of ancient trackway built across boggy or waterlogged ground by laying timber, branches, and brushwood in a corduroy arrangement to create a firm passage where otherwise there would be none. The raised field level, higher than the surrounding ground on either side, hints at the kind of marginal, saturated terrain where such structures were necessary.

What the drain face revealed was modest but precise: five roundwood timbers between six and nearly ten centimetres in diameter, laid longitudinally, with two or three pieces of thinner brushwood alongside them. The exposed width was just under one and a half metres, the depth around a third of a metre. Two possible split timber pegs were found nearby, one with a shaped, worked end, and a split timber transverse piece ran perpendicular beneath the main band, aligned roughly northwest to southeast. The assembly suggests a class 3 togher, a relatively simple form of the structure, built with unprocessed or lightly worked timber rather than the more elaborate planked surfaces seen in other examples. One detail complicates any confident dating: a rusty six-inch nail found beneath one of the roundwoods points to a possible connection with a twentieth-century wetland survey conducted by the Irish Archaeological Wetland Unit at UCD, raising the question of whether those timbers were disturbed or repositioned during fieldwork recorded by Dunne in 1999. The remains themselves may be genuinely ancient; their precise context is less certain.

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