Road - togher, Killoran, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Roads & Tracks

Road – togher, Killoran, Co. Tipperary

Beneath Derryville Bog in County Tipperary, preserved in waterlogged peat, lie the remains of at least twenty-nine ancient roadways, each one a solution to the same persistent problem: how to cross ground that would swallow a person whole.

These are toghers, the Irish term for trackways built across bogland, typically constructed from timber laid directly onto the soft surface to distribute weight and allow safe passage. What makes the network at Killoran townland remarkable is not any single structure but the sheer number of them, clustered together in one surveyed area, offering an unusually dense picture of how people once moved through a landscape that modern visitors would find largely impassable.

A field survey carried out in 1999 recorded the construction in detail. Fifteen of the toghers were built using brushwood alone, the simplest method, essentially a matted layer of thin branches pressed into the bog surface. The remainder combined brushwood with roundwood, the stouter poles providing additional support, and three examples showed evidence of pegs or stakes driven into the ground to hold the structure in place. Wood species were identified in thirteen of the toghers, and the range is telling: alder, ash, birch, elm, hazel, holly, and mountain ash were all present, with ash and hazel appearing most frequently. These were not exotic or imported materials but locally available timber, gathered from the edges of the bog and worked into a practical crossing. Radiocarbon dating of one togher placed its construction somewhere between AD 1024 and 1162, squarely within the early medieval period, though the wider network has not been fully dated and may span different eras entirely.

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