Road - togher, Corlea, Co. Longford

Co. Longford |

Roads & Tracks

Road – togher, Corlea, Co. Longford

In a field in County Longford, a fragment of ancient road surfaced, quite literally, from the ground.

Less than a metre wide where it was exposed, this small patch of togher, the Irish term for a trackway built across boggy or waterlogged ground, represents one of thousands of such structures that once threaded across the Irish midlands, allowing people and animals to move through terrain that would otherwise have been impassable. What makes this particular discovery quietly compelling is how modest it is: a partial survivor, probably clipped on its western edge by a drainage ditch, its full extent impossible to determine from the surface alone.

The structure was composed of brushwood and roundwood laid in a converging arrangement, oriented roughly northwest to southeast and north-northwest to south-southeast. Two slightly heavier roundwood pieces, measuring around six and seven centimetres in diameter, were laid across finer brushwood averaging two centimetres in diameter, a technique that helped lock the material into alignment and provided a firmer surface underfoot. A further two or three roundwood pieces ran east to west across the main body, adding lateral stability. This kind of construction is typical of Iron Age and early medieval bog roads found across the midlands, where builders worked with whatever timber was to hand, weaving and layering it to distribute weight across unstable ground. The site was recorded by Jane Whitaker of Archaeological Development Services and published by Dunne in 1999.

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