Road - class 3 togher, Kilmore, Co. Longford

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Roads & Tracks

Road – class 3 togher, Kilmore, Co. Longford

In the boglands of Kilmore in County Longford, a fragment of ancient road lies preserved beneath the peat, the kind of thing that passes entirely unnoticed on the surface yet represents one of the more remarkable categories of Irish archaeological survival.

It is a togher, a term used for a trackway or causeway built across wet or boggy ground, constructed to make passage possible where the landscape would otherwise have swallowed traveller and animal alike. Toghers were laid using timber, brushwood, peat sods, or combinations of all three, and they survive precisely because the waterlogged, oxygen-poor conditions of a bog are hostile to the decay that would otherwise erase them.

This particular example is classed as a class 3 togher, a designation within a typological system developed to categorise the structural complexity of these ancient roads. Class 3 toghers are generally considered more substantial or carefully constructed than the simpler categories, though the precise engineering of this one remains only partially documented. It was noted during a field survey in 1989, when its orientation was recorded as running northeast to southwest, a detail that hints at its original purpose connecting specific points in the landscape, though what those points were is no longer known. The observation was communicated by B. Raftery, a scholar closely associated with the study of Irish bog roads and wetland archaeology more broadly.

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