Road - togher, Corlea, Co. Longford

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Roads & Tracks

Road – togher, Corlea, Co. Longford

Corlea, in County Longford, is already known for one of the most remarkable Iron Age road surfaces ever found in Ireland, a great track of oak planks laid across bogland around 148 BC.

But the bog holds more than that single famous structure. During drainage work in the area, a band of compacted brushwood and roundwood came to light in the cut faces of a drain, sitting partly below the waterline at its base. No chisel marks, no shaping, no obvious sign that any tool had touched the wood. It was simply there, packed into the peat, a remnant of some older effort to move across wet ground.

A togher is a timber trackway built across boggy or waterlogged terrain, a practical solution to ground that would otherwise be impassable. They range from elaborate constructions of split planks fixed with pegs to simple bundles of branches laid down and abandoned. What was recorded at this Corlea site falls into the simpler category: brushwood with diameters between roughly three and five and a half centimetres, mixed with somewhat stouter roundwood of about seven centimetres across, spread across an exposed width of nearly three metres and roughly twenty centimetres thick. The absence of any worked timber makes it difficult to date with precision or to say much about who laid it or why. It was simply logged, measured, and noted as the drain cut through.

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