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 in County Longford, a narrow track lies preserved beneath the peat, built not from stone or timber planks but from carefully laid hazel brushwood.

It is a togher, the Irish term for a road or causeway constructed across wet or marshy ground, and what survives here is a remarkably precise piece of ancient engineering compressed into a strip just one and a half metres wide and barely six centimetres deep.

The structure runs on an east-west orientation and consists of a compact layer of longitudinal hazel branches, averaging around two and a half centimetres in diameter, with occasional transverse pieces laid across them. The technique is characteristic of what archaeologists classify as a class 3 togher, a relatively modest construction by comparison with the great Bronze Age roadways found elsewhere in the Irish midlands, but no less deliberate in its making. Hazel was a practical choice: it coppices readily, producing long straight shoots, and it is flexible enough to be packed tightly without splitting. Whoever laid this track knew the material well and knew the ground, building just enough structure to make the crossing passable without overbuilding it. Bogs are extraordinary preservers of organic material, starved of oxygen in ways that prevent decay, which is why the brushwood survives at all after what may be centuries or millennia underground.

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