Road - class 3 togher, Derrymany, Co. Longford

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Road – class 3 togher, Derrymany, Co. Longford

In a bog in Derrymany, County Longford, the remains of an ancient roadway lie preserved in the waterlogged peat, invisible from the surface and easily mistaken for nothing at all.

It is a togher, the Irish term for a causeway or trackway built from timber and brushwood to allow passage across wet and boggy ground, and what survives here is a carefully engineered structure rather than a casual bundle of branches thrown across a puddle.

The togher runs east to west and measures roughly 1.5 metres wide and 0.2 metres deep. It was constructed in layers: a base of hazel roundwood, with an average diameter of around 6.5 centimetres, provided the foundation, while the upper surface was laid with longitudinal strips of hazel and birch brushwood, each piece between 1.5 and 3 centimetres in diameter, stacked two to three pieces deep. This kind of graduated construction, coarser material below and finer above, is a considered approach to spreading weight across unstable ground, and the choice of hazel and birch reflects the practical availability of flexible, workable timber in the Irish landscape. What makes the Derrymany example particularly interesting is that it was not built on bare peat. Beneath it lies an earlier togher, a separate structure entirely, suggesting that this particular crossing point was in use across more than one period, with later builders essentially inheriting and rebuilding a route their predecessors had already established.

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