Road - class 3 togher, Corlea, Co. Longford

Co. Longford |

Roads & Tracks

Road – class 3 togher, Corlea, Co. Longford

Preserved beneath the boglands of County Longford, at a site already famous for its ancient timber trackways, lies a road that amounts to little more than a thin carpet of bundled hazel branches pressed into the wetland surface.

A togher, to use the Irish term for these bog roads, was typically a causeway of timber or brushwood laid across waterlogged ground to allow people or livestock to pass. This particular example is modest even by those standards: just under five metres long, no more than a metre and a half wide, and barely two centimetres thick at its deepest point.

The structure was recorded at Corlea, a stretch of midland bog in County Longford that has yielded one of the most significant concentrations of ancient trackways known anywhere in Ireland or Britain. This example, catalogued as Corlea 14, belongs to what archaeologists classify as a class 3 togher, meaning it was constructed from tightly packed brushwood rather than from heavier split or whole timbers. The hazel rods used here were slender, between one and two centimetres in diameter, and laid so densely together that they formed a continuous mat across the bog surface. Notably, the trackway narrowed as it ran from south-west to north-east, suggesting either that the ground conditions changed along its length or that its builders were working with a diminishing supply of material. The site is documented in the work of Barry Raftery, the archaeologist whose excavations at Corlea through the late 1980s and 1990s brought the full extent of the bog road complex to scholarly attention.

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