It is narrow, just thirty-five centimetres wide, and stretches thirty-four metres in an east-west direction, its surface resting on smaller roundwood timbers laid transversely beneath it. The proportions alone are quietly thought-provoking: this is not a grand causeway but something more modest and purposeful, a working route across wet ground built by people who understood their landscape precisely.

The structure is a togher, the Irish term for a timber trackway laid across boggy terrain to allow passage that would otherwise be impossible or dangerous. Bogs preserve wood exceptionally well in their cold, anaerobic conditions, which is why tогher timbers can survive for millennia and, crucially, can be dated with unusual precision through dendrochronology, the science of dating wood by matching the pattern of its annual growth rings against established reference chronologies. The two timber samples taken from this trackway, catalogued as Q9369 and Q9370, returned dates of 1606 BC plus or minus nine years and 1590 BC plus or minus nine years respectively. That places construction somewhere in the middle Bronze Age, a period when Irish communities were farming, trading, and moving across a landscape that looked quite different from today's, with considerably more wetland covering the midlands and their fringes. Someone, in other words, had a regular enough reason to cross this particular stretch of bog that it was worth the considerable effort of felling timber and laying a road.