Road - class 3 togher, Castle Ffrench, Co. Galway

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Roads & Tracks

Road – class 3 togher, Castle Ffrench, Co. Galway

Nearly two metres below the surface of a cut-away bog near Castle Ffrench in County Galway, the remains of an ancient walkway have been exposed in a south-facing bank.

A togher is a bog road, typically constructed from timber to allow passage across otherwise impassable wetland, and the example here belongs to what is classified as a class 3 type, a plank walkway rather than the heavier corduroy-style roads made from whole logs laid side by side. What makes this particular find quietly arresting is the precision with which it has survived: a central split plank, still measurably flat on its underside, flanked by longitudinal roundwoods, all of it resting on a substructure of transverse timber and brushwood packed with twigs. The silver bark still visible on some of the brushwood pieces is a small, startling detail, a material that was green and freshly cut when someone laid it down, now preserved by the anaerobic chemistry of the peat that buried it.

The structure sits 1.9 metres beneath the bog surface, half a metre above the waterline in a drain running along its eastern edge. It is aligned roughly north-north-east to south-south-west, and it runs directly into the uncut bank at its northern end, suggesting that more of the road continues into the bog beyond what is currently visible. The southern roundwood was found in three pieces, likely fractured during the mechanical cutting of the bog that first exposed the structure. A timber initially recorded as a peg proved on closer inspection to be a lath, a small but telling reminder of how easily the interpretation of ancient woodwork can shift with better examination. The western extent of the togher remains uncertain, covered by a shallow layer of uncut peat roughly 20 centimetres deep.

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