Road - class 3 togher, Derrynagran, Co. Longford

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Roads & Tracks

Road – class 3 togher, Derrynagran, Co. Longford

In the bogland of Derrynagran, County Longford, a road lies preserved in the peat, built not for carts or armies but simply for crossing wet ground that would otherwise have been impassable.

It is a togher, the Irish term for a wooden trackway laid across boggy or marshy terrain, and it survives as one of many such structures recorded across the Irish midlands, where centuries of waterlogged conditions have kept timber intact long after drier landscapes would have swallowed every trace.

This particular togher runs east to west and measures 1.5 metres wide and roughly 0.1 metres deep, constructed from transverse oak roundwood with an average diameter of 0.065 metres, interspersed with hazel brushwood. The basic technique, laying split or rounded timbers across the direction of travel to create a stable surface over soft ground, was widely used in prehistoric and early medieval Ireland, and the Irish boglands have yielded examples spanning thousands of years. What makes this example quietly interesting is a single peg recovered from within the body of the trackway that bears visible toolmarks, a small but direct trace of the person who shaped it and drove it into the ground, giving the structure a human particularity that raw measurements alone cannot supply.

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