Road - class 3 togher, Derryglogher, Co. Longford
Co. Longford |
Roads & Tracks
Beneath the bogland of Derryglogher in County Longford, a road runs.
Not a road in any modern sense, but a togher, one of Ireland's ancient timber trackways laid across wet and unstable ground to allow people and animals to cross terrain that would otherwise have been impassable. This particular example is classed as a class 3 togher, a category that generally refers to a more rudimentary form of construction, typically brushwood, light timbers, or other organic material laid directly onto the bog surface rather than the more elaborate corduroy or plank arrangements seen in higher-classification examples.
The trackway was recorded during a field survey in 1988 and runs on a NNE-SSW orientation, a detail that hints, however faintly, at the kind of purposeful route-making that shaped movement across the Irish midlands for millennia. The information came by way of B. Raftery, the late Professor Barry Raftery of University College Dublin, whose work on Irish bog roads and prehistoric trackways was foundational to the field. Raftery and the Irish Archaeological Wetland Unit, which operated out of UCD, systematically catalogued these features at a time when drainage and turf-cutting were placing enormous pressure on bogland archaeology across the country. Toghers like this one are rarely visible and seldom celebrated, yet they represent some of the oldest engineered infrastructure in Ireland, with examples elsewhere dating back several thousand years. The Derryglogher trackway sits within that broader tradition, a quiet line through the peat that once connected somewhere to somewhere else.
