Road - class 3 togher, Derrylough, Co. Longford

Co. Longford |

Roads & Tracks

Road – class 3 togher, Derrylough, Co. Longford

Buried in the bogland of Derrylough in County Longford lies a road that was never meant to be seen again.

It is a togher, an ancient trackway built across wet or marshy ground, and it has survived precisely because the waterlogged conditions that once made it necessary also preserved it. While most early roads rotted away or were simply lost to time, the peat sealed this one in place, holding it more or less intact beneath the surface.

The structure itself tells a careful story of construction. The togher runs on an east-north-east to west-south-west orientation and measures 2.2 metres wide and roughly 0.2 metres deep, dimensions that suggest a route intended for regular, purposeful use rather than casual crossing. Beneath the upper layer of worked roundwood, cut from alder and ash with an average diameter of about 10 centimetres, lies a substructure of hazel, its stems averaging just 2 centimetres across. This lower layer may have functioned as a hurdle, a woven or laid framework of thin branches used to stabilise soft ground before heavier timbers were placed on top. The combination of species is telling: alder and ash are durable and well-suited to wet environments, while hazel, more pliable and abundant, would have served the foundational work efficiently. Someone who knew their materials built this.

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