This is a togher, an ancient Irish bog road, and the one recorded at Lurgoe is no ordinary trackway. Running approximately 600 metres on a northeast-southwest axis, it connected the monastery on the bog island of Derrynaflan to the smaller island of Derrynabrone, threading through flat, waterlogged terrain that would otherwise have made regular movement between the two points extremely difficult. The structure was revealed, along with several other trackways in the adjoining bog, by peat-milling operations, the industrial cutting of turf that stripped back centuries of preservation to expose what lay underneath.

Derrynaflan is already known to archaeologists and historians as the site where one of Ireland's most significant early medieval ecclesiastical treasures was found in 1980. But the togher draws on a different kind of fame, one that is literary rather than material. In the Latin Lives of St. Ruadhan of Lorrha, a text recorded by Byrne in 1980, there is an account of a causeway built across the great bog of Lurga between the monastery of Derryvella and that of Derrynaflan. Bishop Columbanus, son of Dar Aine, of Daire Mar, sent Ruadan and his monks a gift of butter by cart drawn by two oxen, and in the telling of the story, a wide firm path miraculously appeared through the bog to allow the cart to pass. Whether or not the togher uncovered here is the physical counterpart of that story, the geographical correspondence is close enough to make the connection worth sitting with. The 1903 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map adds a further layer of curiosity, marking the causeway's starting point near a feature labelled 'Gobban Saer's Grave', Gobban Saer being a figure from Irish legend associated with miraculous building and craftsmanship, a fittingly strange address for a road that exists somewhere between engineering and miracle.