The coincidence of alignment is the quietly unsettling detail here, two separate communities arriving at the same solution to the same soggy problem, separated by a span of time longer than that between us and the Norman invasion of Ireland.

A togher is a bog road, a timber trackway built to allow safe passage across ground that would otherwise swallow a person whole. The Killoran example is a substantial piece of engineering for its era: fifteen metres long and four metres wide, constructed from large longitudinal trunks laid along the direction of travel, with smaller roundwood and brushwood packed between them to create a stable surface. A large oak trunk pulled from the structure was dendrochronologically dated to 460 BC, give or take nine years, placing its construction firmly in the Irish Iron Age. The second trackway at the site shares the same alignment but dates to around three centuries later, suggesting that whoever needed to cross this stretch of bog in that later period either rediscovered a logical route or inherited some folk memory of where firm footing could be won from the marsh.