Road - road/trackway, Bray, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Roads & Tracks
Beneath the surface of a Kerry bog, a narrow path has been waiting.
It measures just sixty centimetres across, barely wide enough for a person walking carefully, and it was only brought to light when peat-cutting operations broke through the layers above it. The track sits about thirty-five centimetres below the bog surface in the Imlagh Basin on the Iveragh Peninsula, running north to south through what is now a landscape of slow-accumulating peat. That it survived at all is largely down to the bog itself, which preserves organic material with quiet efficiency by sealing it from oxygen.
A sample of peat taken from the level of the track returned a radiocarbon date of 1700 plus or minus 80 years before present, placing its use somewhere in the early centuries of the first millennium AD, roughly the late Iron Age or early medieval period in Irish terms. The track overlies a layer of Phragmites peat, the kind formed from the decomposed remains of common reed, which suggests the ground here was already wet and marshy when the path was laid down. Bog roads of this era, sometimes called toghers, were typically built to allow passage across ground that would otherwise have been impassable, and they range from elaborate arrangements of split timbers and brushwood to simpler earthen constructions like this one. The Bray example falls at the modest end of that spectrum, an unassuming strip of compacted earth that nonetheless implies regular movement through a wet and difficult landscape, and a community that found it worth the effort to maintain a route across it.