A togher, as these bog roads are known in Irish archaeology, is a trackway built from timber and other materials laid across wet or unstable terrain, essentially an early engineered solution to a landscape that swallowed feet and wheels alike. The example at Leigh is not a modest path: at eight metres wide, it was a substantial construction, more thoroughfare than footway.

The togher was first recorded in the 1960s by Rynne, who documented it as a brushwood and gravel track running in a west-southwest to east-northeast direction, held in place by wooden pegs of birch and hazel, each around a metre long and four centimetres in diameter. Excavation showed that the roadway was built from rounded beams of oak, ash and birch, laid side by side transversely across the line of travel, a technique designed to spread weight and resist the pull of the bog. The site does not sit in isolation. To the west lie the early medieval Liathmore churches, and additional toghers have been identified nearby, including a narrow brushwood and plant trackway just one metre wide and a second, more fragmentary construction of split planks orientated east to west. The clustering of these features around bogland on high ground suggests the area was a node of movement and activity for a considerable period. When the Irish Archaeological Wetland Unit from UCD inspected the principal togher in 1995, they found it was actively being destroyed by industrial peat milling, a fate that has overtaken many such sites across the Irish midlands.