Road - class 3 togher, Corlea, Co. Longford

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Roads & Tracks

Road – class 3 togher, Corlea, Co. Longford

Buried in the bogland of Corlea in County Longford lies a stretch of ancient road that was never meant to last.

At less than a metre wide and barely a hand's depth in the peat, it is easy to overlook, yet it represents a remarkably deliberate piece of early engineering. This is a togher, a term for a wooden trackway laid across soft or waterlogged ground, essentially a path built from timber to allow people, animals, or goods to cross terrain that would otherwise swallow them whole.

This particular example runs east to west and was constructed from longitudinal roundwood and brushwood, the timbers laid lengthways along the line of travel rather than as transverse planks. The wood is predominantly ash and hazel, both common choices in early Irish wetland construction, likely because they were readily available and could be cut and shaped without great difficulty. The trackway measures roughly 0.9 metres wide and 0.23 metres deep, dimensions that place it in what archaeologists classify as a class 3 togher, a lighter and narrower type compared to the more monumental Iron Age plank roads for which Corlea is already known. Corlea is in fact one of the most significant bog road sites in Europe, and the presence of multiple trackways at different scales suggests the area was crossed and re-crossed over long periods, the bog demanding constant effort to traverse and constant renewal of the timber underfoot.

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