Road - class 3 togher, Baunmore, Co. Kilkenny

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Road – class 3 togher, Baunmore, Co. Kilkenny

Buried in the peat of Baunmore bog in County Kilkenny lies a road that no wheeled vehicle ever used, and that no map recorded until the mid-1990s.

It is a togher, the Irish term for a wooden trackway laid across boggy or waterlogged ground, and its survival depends entirely on the airless, preserving conditions of the bog itself. Above ground it is invisible; below, it endures.

The Baunmore togher is a modest but precise piece of ancient engineering. It runs east to west, measures 1.4 metres in width, and sits just 0.08 metres below the surface of the bog. It was built using roundwood and brushwood arranged in both transverse and longitudinal elements, a construction method that distributed weight across the soft ground and allowed people, and possibly animals or goods, to cross what would otherwise have been impassable terrain. Tογhers of this kind are classified by archaeologists according to their complexity and materials; this one falls into class 3, indicating a fairly straightforward layered structure rather than the more elaborate planked or mortised types found elsewhere in Ireland. It came to light in 1995, when the Irish Archaeological Wetland Unit at University College Dublin conducted a pilot survey of the Littleton Works, a drainage and peat-extraction area that cuts through this part of the midlands. Drainage and commercial peat cutting have, over many decades, both destroyed and inadvertently exposed ancient trackways across Ireland's bogs, making surveys of this kind a race against ongoing land alteration.

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