Road - class 3 togher, Derryglogher, Co. Longford

Co. Longford |

Roads & Tracks

Road – class 3 togher, Derryglogher, Co. Longford

In the boglands of Derryglogher in County Longford, two ancient roads occupy the same line through the landscape, one stacked directly on top of the other.

The lower of the two is a togher, a type of wooden trackway laid across soft or waterlogged ground to allow passage where none would otherwise be possible. This particular example runs east to west, measures roughly 80 centimetres wide, and survives to a depth of about 9 centimetres. What makes it quietly remarkable is not its dimensions but its position: it lies buried beneath a separate togher entirely, meaning that at some point in the past, people returned to precisely this route and built again on the same ground.

The lower togher was constructed from densely packed longitudinal brushwood, branches and stems laid lengthwise along the direction of travel rather than across it. This is a relatively simple form of trackway, functional rather than elaborate, designed to distribute weight across ground that would otherwise swallow a traveller whole. Irish bogs preserve such structures with extraordinary fidelity, the acidic, oxygen-poor conditions slowing decomposition almost to a halt. The site was documented by the Irish Archaeological Wetland Unit at University College Dublin, whose systematic survey of midland boglands in the early 1990s brought dozens of such features to light. The reference to Moloney and colleagues dates the published record to 1993. The stratigraphic relationship between this togher and the one above it raises questions that the available record does not fully answer, including how much time separates the two phases of construction and whether the upper trackway was built in conscious knowledge of what lay below.

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