Road - togher, Derryvella, Co. Tipperary

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Roads & Tracks

Road – togher, Derryvella, Co. Tipperary

Beneath the drained surface of Derryvella bog in County Tipperary lies the surviving trace of a togher, an ancient trackway built to carry people across otherwise impassable wetland.

Toghers were typically constructed from timber, brushwood, or a combination of both, laid directly onto the bog surface or into the peat, and they range in age from the Neolithic to the early modern period. This particular example runs roughly northwest to southeast across the northern end of the bog, and it is fragmentary enough that its original construction method is no longer easy to read.

When the togher was recorded, it measured approximately 22.4 metres in surviving length, with a width varying between roughly 1.32 and 2.5 metres and a depth of between 4 and 12 centimetres. At its southeastern end, three small brushwood elements were still visible on the field surface, orientated roughly east to west, each slender in diameter and ranging from just over 10 centimetres to around 57 centimetres in length. The peat into which the trackway was originally laid is described as poorly humified, meaning it had not broken down far from its original plant material, and it was rich in sphagnum moss with significant bog bean and occasional eriophorum, the cottongrass whose white tufts are characteristic of wet Irish bogs. That botanical composition points to a once-saturated, active raised bog, exactly the kind of terrain that would have made a constructed crossing both necessary and challenging. Unfortunately, exposure to machinery had left the structure in a poor state, and much of what the original builders put together is now beyond confident interpretation.

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