Road - class 3 togher, Baunmore, Co. Kilkenny

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Road – class 3 togher, Baunmore, Co. Kilkenny

Beneath the boglands of Baunmore in County Kilkenny, an ancient road lies preserved in the peat, built not from stone or gravel but from bundles of brushwood pressed into the wet ground.

It is a togher, the Irish word for a trackway constructed across boggy or waterlogged terrain, and this particular example is modest in its dimensions: roughly one and a half metres wide and about ten centimetres deep. That modesty, though, should not obscure what it represents. Someone, at some point, needed to cross this ground badly enough to engineer a solution.

The trackway was found in 1995 by the Irish Archaeological Wetland Unit, based at University College Dublin, during a pilot survey of the Littleton Works. Brushwood toghers like this one belong to a long tradition of bog road construction in Ireland, in which branches, twigs, and other woody material were laid down in layers to distribute weight and provide a stable surface across otherwise impassable ground. The bog's anaerobic conditions, low in oxygen and highly acidic, are precisely what allow organic materials to survive for centuries or even millennia, which is why such structures can still be recorded in something approaching their original form. The classification of this example as a class 3 togher reflects a typological system used to categorise these trackways by their construction method and complexity.

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