Road - class 3 togher, Longfordpass, Co. Tipperary

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Roads & Tracks

Road – class 3 togher, Longfordpass, Co. Tipperary

Beneath the cutaway bogs of Longfordpass in County Tipperary, the remains of a carefully engineered Iron Age road lie pressed into the peat, built at some point between 170 BC and AD 110.

It is just 1.2 metres wide, barely enough for a person carrying a load, and its full length has never been established. What makes it worth pausing over is less its scale than its construction: this is a togher, a type of ancient trackway built across bogland using woven hurdle panels, and the craftsmanship involved is surprisingly precise for something laid down two thousand years ago in a waterlogged landscape.

A 2006 peatland survey recorded the togher oriented northeast to southwest, the direction suggesting it was connecting two points of some local significance, though what those points were is no longer recoverable. The structure was built as a hurdle platform, meaning panels of woven brushwood were laid flat across the bog surface to distribute weight, much as a modern engineer might use a geotextile membrane. Heavy brushwood rods formed the main framework, interwoven with lighter rods, the brushwood ranging from two to four centimetres in diameter. Beneath this woven surface, roundwood timbers with average diameters of around eight centimetres were laid transversely and irregularly, providing a base layer. The peat surrounding it is described as poorly humified pool peat, meaning it decomposed slowly and retained moisture well, which is precisely the condition that preserved the organic material so effectively over two millennia. Eriophorum, the cottongrass common to Irish raised bogs, and Calluna, the familiar heather, were present in the peat matrix. By the time it was recorded, the togher was moderately well preserved, though industrial milling of the bog surface had damaged the portions brought closest to the surface.

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