What the peat preserved is modest in scale but genuinely remarkable: a section of togher, the Irish term for a trackway built across wet or marshy ground, constructed from hazel brushwood packed tightly together. The bundle measures just under four metres wide and roughly ten centimetres deep, the individual rods no thicker than a thumb. Someone, at some point, pushed a wooden peg through the whole assembly to hold it in place, and that peg still carries the marks of the tool that shaped it.

Toghers were a practical solution to a landscape that would otherwise have been impassable for much of the year. Builders cut flexible young branches, often hazel, and wove or stacked them into a surface firm enough to carry foot traffic or livestock across ground that shifted and swallowed. This particular example is classed as a hurdle togher, meaning the brushwood was laid as a consolidated mat rather than as planks or split timbers. It runs on a north-north-east to south-south-west orientation, suggesting it was going somewhere specific, connecting two points in a landscape now largely obscured by centuries of peat growth. The toolmarks on the retaining peg are a small but arresting detail: they are direct physical evidence of someone working wood with a blade, shaping a solution to an everyday problem of movement and ground.