Road - class 3 togher, Corlea, Co. Longford
Co. Longford |
Roads & Tracks
In the boglands of County Longford, a narrow band of timber lies preserved beneath the peat at Corlea, part of a landscape that contains one of the more remarkable concentrations of ancient roadways in Ireland.
This particular example is what archaeologists call a togher, a wooden trackway laid across wet or boggy ground to allow passage where the earth would otherwise swallow a traveller whole. The bog, by sealing out oxygen, has kept such structures intact for thousands of years, which is why timber felled long before written Irish history can still be examined in something close to its original form.
This togher runs on a northwest to southeast orientation and measures 1.62 metres wide and around 0.2 metres deep. It was constructed from transverse roundwood, meaning lengths of timber laid crossways across the line of travel, a straightforward but effective method for distributing weight over soft ground. Occasional brushwood was woven into the structure as well, providing extra stability or filling gaps between the heavier pieces. Most of the wood is birch, a fast-growing species that would have been readily available at the bog's edge, though some oak was also used. Oak is a considerably denser and more durable timber, and its presence alongside birch suggests either a practical mix of whatever was to hand or a degree of deliberate selection for load-bearing sections. Corlea itself is already known for a much larger Iron Age trackway dated to 148 BC, now partly displayed in a nearby interpretive centre, so this class 3 togher sits within a wider pattern of human movement and engineering across the same boggy terrain over many centuries.
