Road - class 3 togher, Derrynagran, Co. Longford

Co. Longford |

Roads & Tracks

Road – class 3 togher, Derrynagran, Co. Longford

In a boggy corner of County Longford, beneath the waterlogged ground of Derrynagran, lies the remains of a road that was never meant to be driven on.

It is a togher, the Irish term for a timber trackway laid across soft or marshy terrain, and it survives in the kind of detail that only anaerobic bog conditions can preserve. At just 1.7 metres wide and barely seven centimetres deep, this is not a grand causeway but something altogether more modest and more telling: a practical solution to difficult ground, built by people who knew exactly which timbers to cut and how to lay them.

The construction method belongs to what archaeologists classify as a class 3 togher, meaning the timbers run longitudinally along the line of travel rather than being laid as transverse planks or brushwood bundles. The roundwood used, with individual pieces ranging from roughly six to seven centimetres in diameter, came from oak and ash, both reliable choices for wet conditions, oak in particular being well known for its durability when kept consistently damp. The trackway runs on a north-north-east to south-south-west axis, suggesting it was laid to connect specific points across the wetland rather than simply to skirt the bog edge. No date is given in the available record, but tогher construction in Ireland spans thousands of years, from the Neolithic through to the early medieval period, and many examples found in midland bogs have returned surprisingly precise dates through dendrochronology and radiocarbon analysis.

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