Road - togher, Leigh, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Roads & Tracks
Beneath the flat expanse of bog at Leigh in County Tipperary, a road runs through the dark.
Not a road in any modern sense, but a togher, the Irish term for a timber trackway laid across bogland to allow passage through terrain that would otherwise swallow a traveller whole. What makes this particular togher quietly remarkable is precisely what makes it so difficult to know: it lies some three and a half metres below the present surface of the bog, effectively sealed away from investigation by the very landscape that preserved it.
The togher came to light in 1960, and was subsequently recorded by the archaeologist Rynne, who published his account in 1965. Rynne established that the trackway runs on a northwest to southeast orientation, a alignment that suggests it was not a casual or temporary crossing but part of a deliberate route connecting two points of some significance. Such bog roads were typically constructed from split timber planks or brushwood laid transversely across the soft ground, sometimes secured with pegs, and they represent considerable communal effort. They appear throughout Irish prehistory and into the early medieval period, often threading between settled areas and crossing otherwise impassable lowland bogs. The Leigh togher's position on flat bog with open views in all directions hints at landscape that, in drier conditions or at a different point in the bog's long accumulation, may once have been routinely travelled.
Because the trackway sits so far below the surface, no physical examination of its timbers or construction has been possible, which means the question of its age remains open. The bog above it continues to do what bogs have always done: grow slowly, compress what lies beneath, and keep its secrets at depth.
