It is easy to overlook the ambition involved in that: people needed to cross this landscape badly enough to engineer a solution from the materials the surrounding woodland could provide.

The structure is a togher, the Irish term for a timber trackway constructed across boggy or waterlogged ground. This particular example is classified as a class 3 togher, meaning it is built from dispersed longitudinal roundwood rather than from carefully laid planks or more elaborate carpentry. The timbers, birch and alder both, run roughly north-north-east to south-south-west, suggesting a deliberate route aligned to connect specific points across an otherwise impassable stretch of wetland. Alder in particular was long favoured for wet-ground construction because it resists decay unusually well when kept permanently waterlogged. The trackway measures two metres wide and around twelve centimetres deep, modest dimensions that nonetheless represent a significant communal undertaking. Toghers of this kind survive across Irish bogs precisely because the anaerobic, acidic conditions that make the land so difficult to cross are the same conditions that prevent organic material from rotting away entirely.