Road - class 3 togher, Ballykilleen, Co. Offaly

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Roads & Tracks

Road – class 3 togher, Ballykilleen, Co. Offaly

Beneath the bogland of Ballykilleen in County Offaly, a narrow road survives that was never built for wheels or horses.

It is a togher, an ancient trackway of laid timber constructed across wet ground, and this particular example measures just over four metres wide but only twelve centimetres deep, a thin raft of wood pressed into the peat. That modest depth is part of what makes togher archaeology quietly remarkable: the anaerobic conditions of a raised bog can preserve organic material for centuries or even millennia, holding in place what would rot away almost immediately on dry land.

This togher runs north to south and is built from more than twenty individual pieces of timber, including slender brushwood, thicker roundwoods, and at least one sawn plank roughly twenty-eight centimetres wide. The elements are laid longitudinally and fitted closely together, a construction method consistent with a class 3 togher, meaning a relatively substantial and deliberate piece of engineering rather than a casual scattering of branches across a soft patch. The wood is in mixed condition, with some deterioration already visible, which is not unusual once peat cutting or drainage exposes timber that has been sealed from the air for so long. The surrounding deposit is moderately humified Sphagnum peat, the kind of slowly accumulated, compressed moss that forms the body of an Irish raised bog, with occasional traces of Eriophorum, the cottongrass whose white seed heads are one of the more familiar sights above a living bog surface. Two further recorded sites lie within five metres of this one, suggesting that this corner of Ballykilleen was a focus of repeated activity, perhaps a crossing point that different communities returned to across long stretches of time.

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