Road - togher, Corlea, Co. Longford
Co. Longford |
Roads & Tracks
In the boglands of Corlea in County Longford, a stretch of ancient trackway was found lying not as it was built, but at a right angle to its original direction of travel.
What first appeared on the field surface as a compact band of brushwood, roughly 3.7 metres long and 2.3 metres wide, aligned on a north-north-west to south-south-east axis, turned out on closer inspection to be something else entirely: the transverse elements, the crosswise timbers, of a togher that had originally run east-north-east to west-south-west. A togher is a raised wooden road built across boggy or waterlogged ground, a form of construction that appears throughout Ireland's wetlands and dates back thousands of years in various forms.
Excavation revealed that the trackway was constructed from roundwood and brushwood, with individual pieces ranging from about a centimetre to fifteen centimetres in diameter. Posts and pegs were used to hold the structure in place, anchoring it against the soft and shifting ground beneath. The Corlea area is already associated with one of the most significant Iron Age toghers ever uncovered in Ireland, and this smaller, separate structure adds another layer to an already complex archaeological landscape. The discovery was originally recorded in 1999 and subsequently examined in greater detail, with findings published by Dunne in 2002.
