Road - togher, Globeisland, Co. Kildare
Co. Kildare |
Roads & Tracks
Somewhere in the boglands of County Kildare, at a townland called Globeisland, the ground holds the remains of a togher, one of Ireland's most quietly remarkable categories of ancient infrastructure. A togher is a bog road, typically constructed from timber planks, brushwood, or split logs laid across the soft, waterlogged ground to allow people and animals to cross terrain that would otherwise swallow them whole. These structures were built across thousands of years, from the Neolithic period onwards, and the preserving qualities of peat mean that some survive in extraordinary condition, their wooden timbers still intact beneath the surface long after the communities that built them have vanished entirely.
Globeisland is a townland in County Kildare, a county whose landscape is shaped in large part by the great raised bogs of the Irish midlands. The presence of a togher here points to a time when crossing this ground was a practical necessity, and when the labour involved in laying a road through a bog represented a significant communal or organised effort. Such roads often connected settlements, facilitated the movement of livestock, or provided access to resources within the bog itself. Beyond these general observations, the specific details of this particular togher, its date, its construction method, and the circumstances of its discovery, remain to be established from the available record.
