Road - class 3 togher, Derryglogher, Co. Longford
Co. Longford |
Roads & Tracks
In the bogland of Derryglogher in County Longford, two ancient roads lie stacked on top of one another, one directly above the other, as though whoever built the second had decided the first was simply in the right place.
The upper of the two is a class 3 togher, a type of timber trackway laid across wet or marshy ground to allow passage where the ground would otherwise swallow a traveller whole. This one runs on a north-north-west to south-south-east alignment, measuring 1.65 metres wide and 0.25 metres deep, and is constructed from longitudinal roundwood and brushwood, the timbers laid lengthways to create a firm surface over the soft peat beneath.
What makes the Derryglogher togher quietly remarkable is not just its construction but its position. Directly below it lies a separate, earlier trackway, suggesting that this crossing point across the bog was used, abandoned, and then used again, with the second builders either unaware of what lay beneath them or simply indifferent to it, laying their own road over the ghost of the first. Toghers of this kind are known from across the Irish midlands, where raised bogs preserved timber that would have rotted away long ago in drier conditions. The detail here comes from research published by Moloney and colleagues in 1993, carried out as part of systematic wetland survey work that catalogued such structures across the region.
