Road - togher, Derryfadda, Co. Tipperary

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Roads & Tracks

Road – togher, Derryfadda, Co. Tipperary

Beneath the flat bogland of Derryfadda in County Tipperary lies a road that nobody has walked for roughly four thousand years.

It is a togher, the Irish term for a wooden trackway laid across wet or boggy ground, and what makes this one quietly remarkable is the precision with which we can place it in time: radiocarbon dating puts its construction somewhere between 2205 and 1795 BC, placing it firmly in the Early Bronze Age, when the people crossing this landscape were working with metal for the first time in Ireland.

The trackway runs on a northeast to southwest alignment and measures just over six metres in length and about three and a half metres wide. That width is generous by the standards of prehistoric bog roads, suggesting it may have carried some regular traffic rather than serving as a casual shortcut. The construction method is practical and unfussy: roundwood timbers laid lengthways, supported by both longitudinal and transverse beams beneath, with brushwood and wood chips packed into the gaps. The roundwood was placed irregularly rather than dressed or precisely fitted, which gives a sense of builders working quickly with whatever timber was close to hand. Bog conditions are exceptionally good at preserving organic material, and it is precisely because the surrounding peat kept oxygen away from the wood that any trace of this structure survived at all.

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