Road - class 3 togher, Cloontamore, Co. Longford
Co. Longford |
Roads & Tracks
In the bogland of Cloontamore, County Longford, there lies the trace of a road that was never meant for tarmac or cart.
It is a togher, a type of ancient trackway built from timber and other organic materials laid across wet or waterlogged ground to allow passage where the land would otherwise swallow a traveller whole. Tóghar roads of this class were engineering solutions to the Irish landscape long before any modern road authority existed, and the bogs that made them necessary also preserved them, sealing wood and structure in anaerobic conditions for centuries or even millennia.
This particular togher falls into what is classified as a class 3 example, a designation within a typological system used to categorise the construction methods and materials of these ancient wetland roads. It came to wider attention during a field survey carried out in 1988, noted by B. Raftery, one of the foremost scholars of Irish prehistoric and early historic archaeology, whose work on bog roads and wetland archaeology helped establish the academic framework still used to study such sites. The survey was part of broader efforts by the Irish Archaeological Wetland Unit, then based at University College Dublin, to document the remarkable concentration of togher sites preserved across the Irish midlands, a region whose extensive raised bogs have protected an extraordinary range of organic archaeological material that would have vanished entirely in drier conditions.
