Structure - peatland, Derryvella, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Ritual/Ceremonial
Beneath the surface of Derryvella bog in County Tipperary, a few fragments of brushwood mark what was once a deliberate crossing through a wet and otherwise impassable landscape.
The structure is a togher, the Irish term for a trackway laid across boggy ground, and this particular example survives only as three slender lengths of wood, the largest barely a metre and a half long, arranged in a northwest to southeast alignment on the northern edge of the bog.
The togher was constructed from brushwood elements laid longitudinally, two of them running parallel to one another and a third placed roughly 1.5 metres to the east. The timber was in a fragmentary and poorly preserved state when recorded, which is not unusual for organic material in peatland contexts, even where the anaerobic conditions of a bog would ordinarily slow decay. One piece was identified as alder, a wood historically favoured for wet conditions because of its natural resistance to waterlogging. The surrounding peat was composed largely of sphagnum moss, with occasional inclusions of heather and cottongrass, both characteristic plants of an active or semi-active raised bog. The description of the peat as poorly humified suggests it had not broken down far, pointing to a relatively wet, oxygen-poor environment at the time of deposition. Toghers like this one range in date from the Neolithic through to the early modern period, and without dendrochronology or radiocarbon dating it is difficult to say when someone last walked this route across the bog.
