Road - class 3 togher, Corlea, Co. Longford

Co. Longford |

Roads & Tracks

Road – class 3 togher, Corlea, Co. Longford

Beneath the bogland of Corlea in County Longford, a road was laid using timber, not stone.

This is a togher, an ancient trackway built across waterlogged or unstable ground by laying wooden timbers directly onto the surface of a bog. The example recorded here belongs to what archaeologists classify as a class 3 togher, defined by the use of roundwoods, essentially small logs or branches placed side by side across the intended path of travel.

What survives at Corlea is modest but precise: a series of regularly laid roundwood timbers, each roughly 0.45 metres wide and 0.08 metres in diameter. The regularity of their placement suggests deliberate construction rather than improvised crossing, someone knew what they were doing, and they did it with consistency. Corlea is already known for one of the most significant Iron Age bog roads ever excavated anywhere in Europe, a massive oak trackway dating to around 148 BC that is now partially preserved at the Corlea Trackway Visitor Centre nearby. Whether this class 3 togher belongs to the same era or represents a separate, perhaps more modest, phase of activity across the same terrain is not recorded here. Bogs were used and crossed repeatedly over millennia, and a smaller timber road of this kind may have served local, everyday movement rather than the kind of ambitious engineering the larger trackway represents.

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