Road - class 3 togher, Derrynaskea, Co. Longford

Co. Longford |

Roads & Tracks

Road – class 3 togher, Derrynaskea, Co. Longford

Beneath the bogland of Derrynaskea in County Longford lies the trace of an ancient road that most people pass through life without ever knowing existed.

It is classified as a class 3 togher, a term referring to a trackway built across wet or marshy ground, typically constructed from timber, brushwood, or other organic materials laid down to create a passable surface over terrain that would otherwise swallow a traveller whole. These structures are among the more quietly remarkable survivals in the Irish archaeological record, preserved for centuries, sometimes millennia, by the very waterlogged conditions that made them necessary in the first place.

This particular togher at Derrynaskea came to light during a field survey in 1988, noted by B. Raftery, a scholar closely associated with the study of Irish bog roads and their place in the broader landscape of prehistoric and early historic Ireland. The work was carried out under the auspices of the Irish Archaeological Wetland Unit at University College Dublin, a research body dedicated to recording the extraordinary concentration of wetland archaeological sites across the Irish midlands. Bogs in counties like Longford have long been known to preserve organic material in exceptional condition, and togher finds often yield timber that can be dated precisely through dendrochronology, the analysis of tree-ring patterns, offering a direct connection to the hands that felled and laid the wood. The class 3 designation places this togher within a typological framework used to categorise such trackways by their construction method and scale, though the specific details of how this one was built remain sparse from what was recorded at the time.

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