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, a narrow wooden road lies preserved in the waterlogged ground, built not from stone or gravel but from carefully laid branches of ash and birch.

It is a togher, the Irish term for a trackway constructed across wet or marshy terrain, and this particular example is classified as a class 3 type, meaning it was assembled from loosely packed roundwood rather than the more elaborate split planking or heavy timber found in higher-class examples.

The structure runs on an east-northeast to west-southwest orientation and measures 1.2 metres wide and roughly 0.12 metres deep. It is made up of both longitudinal and transverse pieces of roundwood, each between seven and twelve centimetres in diameter, laid in combination to create a surface stable enough to cross otherwise impassable ground. The use of ash and birch is characteristic of Irish wetland trackways generally; both trees were widely available and produced straight, workable stems. Toghers of this kind appear throughout the Irish midlands, where glacially formed boglands made overland movement difficult and sometimes impossible without some form of engineered crossing. They range enormously in age, with some examples dating back thousands of years, though no specific date has been recorded for this one.

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