It came to light in 2013, when a west-facing drain cut through the bog exposed a cross-section of roundwood and brushwood in the peat face. What made the find quietly significant was not its size, which is modest, but the detail preserved within it: bark still clinging to individual pieces, a wooden peg, a fragment of oak split along its radius, and seventeen separate elements bearing the flat, faceted marks of a cutting tool used by someone working the wood sometime between the late tenth and mid-twelfth centuries.

A formal excavation followed, licensed as 14E0284, and a single cutting was opened across the structure. The timbers proved to be mainly alder, birch, and hazel, oriented broadly north to south and covering an area of roughly 2.6 by 1.58 metres, with a maximum depth of 0.44 metres. To date the material, excavators selected a fragment of pomoideae, the botanical family that includes apple, hawthorn, and rowan, and submitted it for AMS dating, a technique that measures residual radiocarbon in organic material to produce a calibrated age range. The result placed the wood firmly in the early medieval period, between approximately 995 and 1154 AD. The structure sat within poorly humified pool peats, meaning the bog had not fully broken down the organic matter around it, which is precisely why the wood survived in such condition. A nearby site recorded as WM039-405 returned comparable dates and a similar composition, raising the possibility that the two form parts of a single, larger feature spread across the bog.