Road - class 3 togher, Derrynagran, Co. Longford

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Roads & Tracks

Road – class 3 togher, Derrynagran, Co. Longford

Buried in the bogland of Derrynagran in County Longford lies a road that nobody has walked for centuries, preserved not by monument or memorial but by the anaerobic quiet of waterlogged peat.

It is a togher, the Irish term for a trackway built across wet or marshy ground, and its survival depends entirely on the conditions that would seem most likely to destroy it: permanent dampness, the absence of oxygen, the slow compression of bog.

This particular togher runs roughly east-south-east to west-north-west and measures 1.2 metres wide and about 17 centimetres deep, modest dimensions that suggest a practical path rather than a major arterial route. It was constructed from hazel brushwood laid longitudinally, the slender rods ranging from roughly 1.6 to 3.2 centimetres in diameter, with occasional thicker pieces of ash roundwood averaging around 7 centimetres across worked in among them. The whole structure was built up four to five rods deep, creating a compact, layered platform firm enough to carry foot traffic across ground that would otherwise have been impassable. Hazel and ash were the common materials of early Irish wetland engineering, both readily coppiced and locally available across the Irish midlands, and their use here points to a community that understood its landscape and worked systematically within it. Toghers of this kind are classified by complexity and construction method, and a class 3 designation indicates a relatively simple but deliberate form of brushwood corduroy road.

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