Road - class 3 togher, Baunmore, Co. Kilkenny

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Road – class 3 togher, Baunmore, Co. Kilkenny

Beneath the surface of Baunmore bog in County Kilkenny, a narrow road made of woven brushwood threads its way through the peat.

It is just over five and a half metres in length at the minimum recorded extent, roughly twelve centimetres deep, and it runs north to south, a quiet insistence that someone, at some point, needed to get somewhere across ground that would otherwise have swallowed them.

This is a togher, the Irish word for a trackway built across boggy or waterlogged terrain. The technique is ancient and practical: bundles or layers of brushwood, sometimes combined with timber planks or pegs depending on the classification, were laid down to create a firm surface over ground too soft to cross on foot. The Baunmore example is classified as a class 3 togher, indicating its compact brushwood construction without heavier structural timbers. It was found in 1995 by the Irish Archaeological Wetland Unit during a pilot survey connected to the Littleton Works, a drainage and development scheme that brought archaeologists into the bogs of the midlands and south at a time when such landscapes were under increasing pressure from industrial extraction. That survey work proved fruitful across the region, and the Baunmore togher is one of many such discoveries that emerged from it, each one a trace of movement through a landscape that has since changed almost beyond recognition.

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