Road - class 3 togher, Corlea, Co. Longford

Co. Longford |

Roads & Tracks

Road – class 3 togher, Corlea, Co. Longford

Buried beneath the boglands of Corlea in County Longford, a section of ancient roadway came to light in a drainage cut, its timbers still holding something of their original arrangement after what may have been thousands of years in the peat.

A togher is a timber trackway built across boggy or waterlogged ground, typically constructed by laying successive layers of wood to spread weight and allow passage where ordinary footing would be impossible. This particular example is a substantial one: the exposed width measured 5.6 metres, with a minimum thickness of 0.4 metres, and the road appeared to run on an east-west axis, cutting more or less at right angles to the drain in which it was revealed.

The construction followed a layered logic. The upper surface, the part a traveller's foot would have met, was made from at least two split timbers supplemented by numerous roundwoods, each between 0.1 and 0.15 metres in diameter. Beneath this lay a dense substructure of small brushwood, the individual pieces averaging around three centimetres across, packed together to form a stable base within the soft bog. More than thirty roundwoods and over a hundred separate pieces of brushwood were recorded in the exposed section alone, giving a sense of how much raw material went into even a short stretch. The site was recorded by Dunne in 1999, and Corlea itself is already known for one of Ireland's most remarkable prehistoric roads, a massive Iron Age trackway of a different class preserved nearby and now housed in a dedicated interpretive centre, which makes this secondary discovery all the more intriguing as evidence that the bogland here was crossed and re-crossed over long periods of time.

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