Road - class 3 togher, Derryoghil, Co. Longford

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Roads & Tracks

Road – class 3 togher, Derryoghil, Co. Longford

Beneath the boglands of Derryoghil in County Longford lies the remnant of a Bronze Age road that predates the oldest written records of Ireland by more than a thousand years.

A togher is a trackway laid across wet or boggy ground, typically constructed from timber, brushwood, or other organic material to allow passage through terrain that would otherwise be impassable. This particular example, fragmentary as it is, offers a rare material glimpse into organised movement across the Irish midland landscape at a period when such infrastructure required considerable communal effort.

Recorded in 1988, the togher at Derryoghil survives in poor condition, stretching at least 3.6 metres in length and just 1.3 metres wide, with a depth of around 0.1 metres. It ran on a north-north-east to south-south-west orientation and was built from a combination of thin longitudinal brushwood, with individual pieces measuring roughly one to two centimetres in diameter, and slightly stouter roundwood of about six centimetres across. Radiocarbon dating placed its construction somewhere between 1678 and 1443 BC, a span that falls within the Irish Middle Bronze Age. The reference work by Raftery, published in 1996, catalogues this structure among the broader corpus of Irish bog roads, situating Derryoghil within a pattern of wetland trackway-building that was once far more widespread across the midlands than the surviving evidence suggests.

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