Road - class 3 togher, Derrynagran, Co. Longford

Co. Longford |

Roads & Tracks

Road – class 3 togher, Derrynagran, Co. Longford

In the boglands of Derrynagran, Co. Longford, a narrow causeway of hazel branches lies preserved in the peat, a remnant of a route that someone once needed badly enough to build by hand.

This is a togher, the Irish term for a wooden trackway laid across wet or waterlogged ground, and this particular example is modest in its dimensions, just 1.3 metres wide and 0.15 metres deep, but precise enough in its construction to have left clear traces of woodworking on the recovered timbers.

The trackway runs east to west and is made up of an irregular scatter of hazel rods laid transversely, each between roughly 23 and 26 millimetres in diameter. Hazel was a practical choice for this kind of work; it is flexible, relatively fast-growing, and easy to work with simple tools. What makes this particular togher especially interesting is what lies beneath it. Approximately 0.45 metres below sits an earlier trackway, a separate structure at a lower level in the peat, which means the same stretch of ground was crossed, abandoned, and crossed again at some later point. Two generations of effort to solve the same problem of moving across an uncooperative landscape, one laid directly above the other as the bog accumulated between them.

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