Road - togher, Derraghan More, Co. Longford
Co. Longford |
Roads & Tracks
A drainage ditch cut through a Longford bog revealed something unexpected in its exposed walls: a neat, densely packed layer of ancient brushwood, arranged with deliberate care and preserved for centuries beneath the waterlogged peat.
This is a togher, an Irish word for a raised wooden trackway built across boggy ground, and the example at Derraghan More is a quietly compelling specimen of a type of structure that once threaded its way across the Irish midlands, allowing people and animals to cross terrain that would otherwise have been impassable.
The togher was found exposed in both faces of a west-running drain, appearing at a depth of around 0.2 metres in one wall and at the top of the other, which gives a sense of how the land surface and peat levels have shifted over time. The main layer consisted of approximately fifty small brushwood pieces laid longitudinally, forming a bed roughly 1.8 metres wide and between five and ten centimetres thick. Along the north and south edges, single roundwood timbers ran parallel to the trackway, and two more roundwoods were set closely together at the centre, resting directly on the brushwood mat beneath. A separate cluster of brushwood was also noted just to the north. Beneath the main structure, a further layer of small brushwood was partially visible, sitting about ten centimetres lower, though it was obscured by water in the drain at the time of recording, which was carried out by Jane Whitaker of Archaeological Development Services and reported by Dunne in 1999. Whether this lower layer represents an earlier phase of construction or simply a gap caused by silting at the waterline was not conclusively established.
What makes toghers like this one particularly interesting is how much information survives in the timber itself. The boggy, anaerobic conditions that made the crossing necessary in the first place are also what preserved the wood. The layered construction at Derraghan More, with its brushwood foundation and roundwood framing, follows a pattern seen in other Irish bog roads, suggesting a practical and fairly standardised approach to a very old engineering problem.
