Road - class 3 togher, Derryaroge, Co. Longford
Co. Longford |
Roads & Tracks
In the boglands of Derryaroge in County Longford, preserved beneath centuries of peat, lies a narrow road that was never built for carts or cattle drives.
It is a togher, an ancient trackway constructed from timber laid directly onto wet or waterlogged ground, designed to carry people across terrain that would otherwise have been impassable. This particular example is modest in scale, just 1.58 metres wide and 0.22 metres deep, but its construction reveals a quiet, methodical craft.
The trackway runs on an east-west orientation and is built in a manner typical of what archaeologists classify as a class 3 togher. Longer pieces of roundwood, each between eight and ten centimetres in diameter, were laid lengthways along the route, and these were supplemented with brushwood averaging around three centimetres across, woven or packed in to fill gaps and provide a more stable surface underfoot. The timber species identified, ash, hazel, and birch, are all native woodland trees common to early medieval Ireland, and their presence suggests the builders were working with whatever the local landscape readily provided. Ash and hazel in particular were widely used in early Irish construction and craftwork, valued for their flexibility and relative straightforwardness to work with hand tools.