These are not the remnants of houses or bridges in any conventional sense, but low structures built directly into wetland, their purpose still not entirely settled. What survives is wood, carefully chosen and carefully laid, that has not seen open air in more than two thousand years.

A field survey conducted by Gowen in 1999 documented the full cluster of structures across the bog. Most were built from a combination of brushwood, the smaller woody stems and branches, and roundwood, meaning unworked timber with its natural round profile intact. In three instances, small pegs were driven in to anchor the structure against the bog's soft, shifting surface, and two platforms showed evidence of woven brushwood, a technique requiring more deliberate craft than simple laying. Radiocarbon dating on four of the platforms placed their construction across a considerable span of prehistory: the earliest dates to the Late Bronze Age, somewhere between 792 and 526 BC, while another falls within the Iron Age, between 351 and 120 BC. The wood species identified at nine of the sites reflect the kinds of trees that would have grown in and around Irish wetlands throughout those periods: alder, ash, birch, hazel, and willow, all species well suited to damp ground and all still familiar in Irish hedgerows and riverbanks today. Whether these platforms were used for fishing, fowling, crossing boggy ground, or some activity that leaves no other trace, the wood itself is the only record that remains.