Road - class 3 togher, Derryaroge, Co. Longford

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Roads & Tracks

Road – class 3 togher, Derryaroge, Co. Longford

Buried in the bogland of Derryaroge in County Longford lies a road that no wheeled vehicle ever travelled.

It is a togher, an ancient timber trackway built not across firm ground but through waterlogged terrain, allowing people on foot to cross what would otherwise have been impassable bog. This particular example measures at least 12.9 metres in length and just 0.6 metres wide, barely the span of a person's shoulders, which gives some sense of how these structures were used: purposeful, direct, utilitarian.

The construction reveals a careful layering of materials. A transverse substructure of large roundwood timbers, some reaching up to 0.23 metres in diameter, formed the base, essentially a series of low runners laid across the bog surface. On top of that, hazel and oak brushwood was arranged longitudinally, six pieces deep, creating a compact and springy walking surface. In one section, a brushwood hurdle, a woven panel of thin branches of the kind also used for fencing and animal enclosures in early medieval Ireland, was pressed into service as the substructure instead. The trackway runs on a northwest to southeast orientation. The toolmarks observed on the timbers were heavily degraded by the time of excavation, but they appear consistent with the use of a stone tool rather than a metal one, which would place the construction in prehistory, though no firm date is attached to this site in the available evidence.

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