Road - class 3 togher, Cloonfiugh, Co. Longford

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Roads & Tracks

Road – class 3 togher, Cloonfiugh, Co. Longford

Beneath the bogland of Cloonfiugh in County Longford, aligned on a north-west to south-east axis, lies a togher, a type of ancient trackway built across wet or marshy ground using timber, brushwood, or other organic materials laid directly onto the bog surface.

Togliers of this kind represent some of the oldest engineered roads in Ireland, and the bogs that swallowed them have, paradoxically, preserved them far better than any dry-land surface could have managed.

This particular example is classified as a class 3 togher, a designation that reflects its construction method and materials rather than any hierarchy of importance. It was noted during a field survey in 1988, with details communicated by B. Raftery, a scholar closely associated with the study of Irish bog roads and prehistoric trackways. The Irish Archaeological Wetland Unit, which was based at University College Dublin, carried out systematic work across the Irish midlands during this period, cataloguing the remarkable density of ancient routes preserved within the peatlands. Longford's boggy interior proved especially rich ground for this kind of investigation, and Cloonfiugh takes its place among a wider pattern of wetland travel across the landscape in the prehistoric and early historic periods.

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