Road - class 3 togher, Pallasboy, Co. Westmeath

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Roads & Tracks

Road – class 3 togher, Pallasboy, Co. Westmeath

Beneath the cutaway surface of Toar Bog in County Westmeath, a medieval path made of sticks and branches once carried people across ground that would otherwise have been impassable.

A togher, as such a structure is known in Irish archaeology, is essentially a trackway laid across bogland using timber, brushwood, or a combination of both, allowing movement through terrain that would swallow a foot whole. This particular example, classified as a class 3 togher on account of its relatively modest construction, survived for centuries in the preserving, oxygen-poor conditions of the peat, until industrial extraction began to expose it.

The trackway came to wider attention during the 2000 Peatland Survey, and was excavated in 2006 as part of a Bord na Móna mitigation season, a programme of archaeological investigation carried out ahead of peat harvesting. Three separate exposures of the structure were recorded. The first showed only scattered fragments of brushwood, thin and small, lying loosely on the field surface. The second was more coherent, with timber elements laid lengthways in a northeast to southwest alignment, placed closely together. The third, though it had suffered mechanical damage, preserved the clearest picture of the original construction: roundwood and brushwood elements, some up to one and a half metres long and nearly a centimetre wide, arranged tightly along the same alignment. The surrounding peat was rich in sphagnum moss, with cottongrass and heather also present, suggesting a wet, open bogland environment at the time the trackway was in use. A fragment of hazel from the structure was submitted for AMS radiocarbon dating, a technique capable of dating very small organic samples with considerable precision, and produced a calibrated date range of approximately AD 1283 to 1392, placing the togher firmly in the late medieval period.

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