A togher is a timber trackway laid across wet or boggy ground, effectively a road built not of stone but of wood, designed to carry people and perhaps livestock across terrain that would otherwise be impassable. This particular example is classed as a class 3 togher, a designation that refers to its construction type within a broader typology developed to catalogue the variety of these structures found preserved in Irish peatlands.

The site was noted during a field survey carried out in 1988, with information communicated by B. Raftery, one of Ireland's foremost authorities on bog roads and prehistoric trackways. The preservation of such structures in peat is a product of the bog's anaerobic, acidic conditions, which prevent the decay of organic material in ways that ordinary soil does not. Ireland's wetlands have yielded toghers ranging from the Neolithic period through to the early medieval era, and while the precise date of the Derryad togher is not recorded in what is currently known about it, its existence points to the long human effort to move through and across a landscape that resisted easy passage. The orientation, running broadly west-northwest to east-southeast, suggests it was connecting specific points across the bog, though what those points were remains unrecorded.