Road - class 3 togher, Corlea, Co. Longford

Co. Longford |

Roads & Tracks

Road – class 3 togher, Corlea, Co. Longford

The boglands around Corlea in County Longford have yielded some of the most remarkable ancient road-building in Europe, and not all of it belongs to the famous Iron Age trackway that draws most of the attention.

Recorded in 1989, a fragment of woven hurdle work was found in the same general area, representing something altogether more modest and more fragmentary: a single panel, badly preserved, measuring at least 0.9 metres in both length and width, the remnant of what archaeologists classify as a class 3 togher. A togher is a timber trackway laid across boggy or waterlogged ground, and the class 3 designation refers to one built from hurdles, that is, panels of woven rods or branches rather than the heavy split oak planks used in the more elaborate road types nearby.

Radiocarbon dating placed the hurdle panel somewhere between AD 43 and AD 617, a wide window that spans the late Iron Age through to the early medieval period. That range reflects the nature of the technique rather than any imprecision in the science: the statistical result, recorded as 1535±30 BP under laboratory reference GrN-16829, simply cannot narrow the date further. What it does confirm is that people were crossing this stretch of midland bog repeatedly over many centuries, improvising routes from whatever timber materials came to hand. The Corlea area appears in the work of the archaeologist Barry Raftery, whose cataloguing of the bog road complex identified this fragment as Corlea 7, distinguishing it from the better-known Corlea 1 trackway dated to 148 BC.

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