Road - togher, Derrindiff, Co. Longford

Co. Longford |

Roads & Tracks

Road – togher, Derrindiff, Co. Longford

In the bogland of Derrindiff, County Longford, a drainage operation cut through the peat and exposed something that had been sealed underground for a very long time: a togher.

A togher is an ancient trackway built across wet or waterlogged ground, typically constructed by laying wood directly onto the bog surface to create a passable route. What emerged here was not a carefully engineered structure but something more pragmatic, heavy roundwood and brushwood packed together to a width of about 1.8 metres and a thickness of roughly 0.3 metres, running on a northeast to southwest orientation. Laid directly on top of the main structure were more than twenty small, tightly packed pieces of brushwood, each only two to three centimetres in diameter, uniform enough to suggest deliberate selection even if no tool marks or other signs of woodworking were visible on any of the material.

The togher came to light in a southwest-facing drain, with two further large pieces of brushwood appearing in the opposite drain face at the same level, confirming that the structure extended across the full cut. A short distance away, roughly three and a half to four metres to the north-northwest, a separate cluster of degraded roundwoods and medium-sized brushwood was found in another drain face. These may have formed part of the same crossing or pathway, though their slightly different orientation and depth make the relationship uncertain. The find was recorded by Jane Whitaker of Archaeological Development Services and published by Dunne in 1999. Tогhers of this kind are found across the Irish midlands, where bogland made overland movement difficult for much of the year, and they range in date from the Bronze Age through to the early medieval period, though no dating evidence is mentioned for this particular example.

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