Road - class 2 togher, Derrynaskea, Co. Longford
Co. Longford |
Roads & Tracks
In the boglands of Derrynaskea in County Longford, beneath layers of peat, lies a road that almost no one has ever walked on consciously.
It is a togher, an ancient timber trackway built to carry people and perhaps livestock across wet, unstable ground, and it survives because the very conditions that made it necessary, the waterlogged, oxygen-poor environment of the bog, also preserved it.
This particular togher runs for 45 metres on a northwest to southeast orientation, is roughly 1.4 metres wide, and survives to a depth of 26 centimetres. It was constructed from longitudinal ash roundwood, meaning stripped or unshaped lengths of ash laid along the direction of travel rather than across it. Ash was a commonly used timber in early Irish construction, valued for its strength and flexibility, and its presence here suggests deliberate material choice rather than opportunistic felling. The classification as a "class 2" togher refers to a typological system used by researchers to categorise these structures by their method of construction; class 2 designates a particular style of longitudinal plank or roundwood arrangement. Toghers of this kind are found across the Irish midlands, a region that was once extensively covered by raised bog, and they represent the mundane engineering of communities who needed reliable routes through an otherwise impassable landscape. The date of this one is not recorded in available sources, but toghers range in age from the Bronze Age through to the early medieval period and beyond.
