Road - class 3 togher, Corlea, Co. Longford

Co. Longford |

Roads & Tracks

Road – class 3 togher, Corlea, Co. Longford

Beneath the boglands of County Longford lies the remains of a road built before writing existed in Ireland, before the wheel had reached these islands, and roughly two millennia before the first stone was laid at the Hill of Tara.

That road is a togher, a term for a wooden trackway laid across wet or waterlogged ground to allow passage where the land itself would otherwise swallow you. This particular example at Corlea is not the famous Iron Age plank road for which the area is best known; it is older and quieter, a more modest structure that has been sitting in the peat, largely unnoticed, for around five and a half thousand years.

The togher was recorded in 1989 and runs on a north-east to south-west orientation. It measured at least 5.9 metres in length and roughly 3 metres in width, with a depth of around 0.2 metres, which gives a sense of its scale: functional rather than monumental, built to get people or animals across a difficult stretch of ground. The construction method was layered: longitudinal brushwood and roundwood placed on top of a smaller deposit of transverse brushwood beneath, the whole thing acting as a kind of raft of timber pressed into the bog. Radiocarbon dating placed its construction between approximately 3654 and 3371 BC, putting it firmly in the Neolithic period. The Corlea bog has yielded multiple trackways across different eras, and this one is catalogued among them, referenced in Barry Raftery's research from 1990 and 1996, which examined the wetland roads of Ireland in considerable depth.

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