Road - class 3 togher, Derryglogher, Co. Longford

Co. Longford |

Roads & Tracks

Road – class 3 togher, Derryglogher, Co. Longford

Buried in the bogland of Derryglogher in County Longford lies a stretch of ancient road that was never meant to last, yet has outlasted almost everything built above the waterline in its era.

It is a togher, the Irish term for a causeway laid across wet or marshy ground, and its survival is owed entirely to the airless, preserving chemistry of the bog that swallowed it.

This particular togher runs on a north-north-east to south-south-west orientation and measures four metres wide and roughly forty centimetres deep, which places it in the more substantial category of such structures. It was built using longitudinal roundwood, lengths of timber laid end to end rather than across the trackway, of birch and alder, with occasional brushwood worked in amongst the main timbers. Both birch and alder were practical choices for bogland construction: alder in particular is known for its resistance to decay when kept wet, and it grew readily in the damp marginal ground that surrounded such crossings. The class 3 designation reflects a recognised typology used to categorise Irish bog roads by their construction method and scale, situating this example within a wider tradition of wetland engineering that stretches back thousands of years across the Irish midlands.

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