Road - class 3 togher, Derryoghil, Co. Longford
Co. Longford |
Roads & Tracks
Beneath the bogland of Derryoghil in County Longford, a road survives that was already ancient when the Iron Age began.
A togher is a trackway built across wet or boggy ground, typically from timber, and the example recorded here dates to between 1286 and 1000 BC, placing its construction firmly in the Bronze Age. The bog, which ordinarily destroys organic material through exposure and decay, did the opposite in this case, preserving wood that still showed clear evidence of deliberate working more than three thousand years after it was laid down.
When archaeologists examined the togher in 1987, they found a carefully engineered structure rather than a rough pile of timber. It was oriented east to west and built in distinct layers: a lower substructure of transverse rods and larger roundwood, each piece averaging around fifteen centimetres in diameter and three metres in length, topped by a surface of smaller longitudinal brushwood running along the direction of travel. Short wooden pegs, roughly eleven centimetres in diameter and less than half a metre long, were used to hold the construction together. At least eleven metres of the trackway was recorded, but if it once crossed the full width of the bog, the original length would have been close to 650 metres. The radiocarbon date of 2925 plus or minus 40 BP was obtained from the wood itself, and the results, published by Barry Raftery in 1990 and again in 1996, place the togher among the documented Bronze Age wetland roads of the Irish midlands, a region where bogland once presented a genuine obstacle to movement and where timber trackways were a practical, recurring solution.
