It surfaced, quite literally, in a drain cut through farmland, where a cross-section of the ground revealed logs laid side by side, still recognisably a constructed path after more than two millennia underground.

What was exposed is a togher, the Irish term for a timber trackway built across boggy or waterlogged ground. The principle is straightforward: lengths of wood are laid perpendicular to the direction of travel, creating a firm surface where the ground beneath would otherwise swallow a person whole. The Baunmore example is a class 3 togher, meaning its construction involved tightly packed, parallel roundwood timbers, each between fifteen and twenty-five centimetres in diameter, with at least one longitudinal timber running beneath them for additional stability. The whole structure was about a metre wide and lay roughly twelve centimetres thick, oriented east to west. Radiocarbon dating of the timber elements placed their felling and use somewhere between 420 and 380 BC, placing this road firmly in the Irish Iron Age. The full length of the trackway remains unknown; only the drain face gave it away, exposing a glimpse of the structure at a depth of around forty centimetres below the present field surface.

There is something quietly arresting about the precision of those dates. Whoever laid these logs was solving a practical problem, crossing a patch of difficult ground, probably as part of a routine journey between two places that mattered to them. The road worked. It held. And then it sank from view and memory entirely, preserved by the very wet ground it was built to overcome.