Road - class 3 togher, Derrymany, Co. Longford

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Roads & Tracks

Road – class 3 togher, Derrymany, Co. Longford

In the bogland of Derrymany, County Longford, lies a road that no wheeled vehicle ever used.

It is two metres wide, barely seven centimetres deep, and it has not carried a traveller in a very long time. What survives is a togher, the Irish word for a bog road, a type of ancient trackway built from timber and brushwood laid directly onto the wet surface of a raised bog to allow people, and sometimes livestock, to cross ground that would otherwise swallow them whole.

This particular togher was constructed on an east-north-east to west-south-west alignment, and it is built from worked brushwood with diameters ranging from about one and a half centimetres up to thirty centimetres, supplemented by outlying roundwood, the material being mostly hazel. The detail matters. Hazel was a practical and widely available choice in early Irish woodland management; it coppices readily, producing straight, workable rods, and its flexibility made it well suited to being woven or stacked into a firm enough surface underfoot. The fact that the brushwood is described as worked suggests deliberate preparation rather than opportunistic dumping of whatever came to hand, pointing to a community that understood the ground and planned accordingly. Toghers range from simple brushwood bundles to elaborate multi-layered timber platforms, and this one, classed as a type three, sits in the middle range of that scale, modest in depth but evidently considered in its construction.

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