This is a togher, the Irish term for a trackway built across wet or marshy ground, and the one preserved here offers a quietly arresting glimpse into how people once negotiated a landscape that would otherwise have been impassable.

The structure runs east to west and measures just under five metres wide and roughly a third of a metre deep, dimensions that suggest a road of some practical ambition rather than a narrow footpath. It was built using longitudinal birch roundwood, the poles laid lengthways along the direction of travel, with thinner hazel brushwood interspersed throughout to fill gaps and stabilise the surface. The birch timbers average about eight centimetres in diameter, the hazel considerably finer at between one and three centimetres. What makes the find particularly compelling is the presence of toolmarks on the wood, direct physical evidence that someone sat down with an implement, shaped these timbers, and put them to work. Bogland preserves organic material with extraordinary fidelity, and so the cuts left by an ancient blade survive here while the person who made them left no other trace.