Road - togher, Longfordpass, Co. Tipperary

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Roads & Tracks

Road – togher, Longfordpass, Co. Tipperary

Beneath the cutaway surface of Littleton Bog in County Tipperary, a modest road of ancient timber lies preserved in the peat.

It is a togher, the Irish term for a wooden trackway built across bogland, constructed by laying roundwood timbers across the soft ground to create a passable surface. This particular example, found at the northern end of the bog in an area known as Longfordpass, stretches roughly 25 metres in length and varies noticeably along its course, narrow and sparse at its northwestern end and considerably more substantial towards the centre and southeast, where timbers were laid densely in a transverse pattern across the route of travel.

The togher was recorded in 2006 during a peatland survey conducted by Archaeological Development Services, with the findings published by Whitaker. At the northwestern end, where the structure sat closer to the bog surface, machine peat-cutting had taken its toll, leaving only a longitudinally laid roundwood and a single transverse piece, the latter unstable and poorly preserved. Where the trackway lay deeper, it fared better. The peat surrounding it was composed of Sphagnum-rich material, relatively poorly humified and containing frequent inclusions of Eriophorum, the cottongrass common to Irish raised bogs. This kind of bog environment is precisely what has allowed wooden trackways across Ireland to survive for centuries or millennia, the waterlogged, oxygen-poor conditions slowing decay almost entirely. Frustratingly, no date was established for this togher, so whether it belongs to the prehistoric, early medieval, or any other period remains an open question.

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