Road - class 3 togher, Derrindiff, Co. Longford

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Roads & Tracks

Road – class 3 togher, Derrindiff, Co. Longford

In a field in Derrindiff, County Longford, a Bronze Age road was being quietly destroyed by a milling machine before anyone fully understood what it was.

The structure, a togher, is a type of ancient wooden trackway built across boggy or waterlogged ground, allowing people and animals to cross terrain that would otherwise be impassable. This particular example came to light first as a band of tightly packed timber on the field surface, roughly a metre and a half wide, before closer investigation revealed its true age and significance.

When excavation was carried out in 2002, radiocarbon dating placed the construction of the trackway between 1206 and 1129 BC, firmly within the Irish Bronze Age. The remains ran on a NNE-SSW alignment and were made up of a combination of brushwood (small branches and woody material, making up roughly 55% of the structure) and roundwood, the thicker, more regular timber pieces, laid transversely across the track. The diameters of individual elements ranged from about 16 millimetres to 140 millimetres. What makes the find particularly interesting is the evidence of deliberate, skilled woodworking: eight of the recovered elements bore toolmarks consistent with chisel and wedge-point instruments, suggesting the timber was not simply gathered and thrown down but was shaped and prepared before use. An earlier visit to the site in 1999 had also identified two further pieces of brushwood exposed nearby, orientated slightly differently on an ESE-WSW axis, hinting at a more complex picture beneath the surface.

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