Toghers are classified by construction method, and a class 3 example typically involves a more substantial form of timber engineering than the simplest brushwood paths, though the precise character of any individual example depends on what survives.

This particular togher was noted during a field survey carried out in 1988, with the orientation detail attributed to the archaeologist B. Raftery. The survey was part of broader work on Irish wetland archaeology, a field that expanded significantly in the latter decades of the twentieth century as researchers recognised that bogland conditions, acidic and oxygen-poor, preserve organic material that would otherwise rot away entirely on dry land. Toghers found in Irish bogs have ranged in date from the Bronze Age to the early medieval period, and some have been shown through dendrochronology, the science of dating timber by its growth rings, to have been built with considerable precision and communal effort. The Derrynaskea example has not been publicly dated with that kind of resolution, but its existence points to the same basic fact that has emerged from wetland sites across Ireland: people have been engineering routes through difficult terrain here for a very long time.