Road - togher, Drummond, Co. Laois
Co. Laois |
Roads & Tracks
Beneath the tarmac of two ordinary roads in Drummond, County Laois, lie the remains of a pair of ancient toghers crossing each other at near-right angles.
A togher is a timber trackway, typically laid across boggy or waterlogged ground using planks, brushwood, or split logs, allowing people and animals to cross terrain that would otherwise have been impassable. They are among the older forms of engineered infrastructure in Ireland, and finding two of them meeting at this kind of deliberate angle suggests the spot was once a meaningful junction in an older landscape, a place where routes converged long before the first mapped roads arrived.
The two toghers at Drummond are recorded on both the 1841 and 1910 editions of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, meaning they were still recognisable as distinct features into the early twentieth century. At some point after that, modern road construction absorbed them entirely. The roads that exist here today were, in a literal sense, built on top of them. Nothing of the original surface is now visible above ground, which makes the site more of a cartographic curiosity than a physical one; the evidence survives on paper rather than in the field.