What the machine was cutting through, it turned out, was a togher, the Irish term for a causeway or trackway laid down across wet or boggy ground, built from timber and brushwood at a time when the midland landscape was far more waterlogged than it appears today.

When archaeologists investigated the site, they found the togher preserved well enough to read its construction in some detail. The exposed section measured 5.6 metres in length and 2.9 metres in width, and it was built in two distinct layers. The lower layer, about 1.08 metres wide, consisted of longitudinal brushwood and twigs laid in the direction of travel. Above that sat a slightly wider band of small brushwood, also laid lengthways, but reinforced by transverse pieces running across the path at right angles, bracing the surface and distributing the weight of anyone crossing. The alignment ran roughly west-northwest to east-southeast. At the better-preserved western end, around thirty tightly packed pieces of brushwood were still present, with individual pieces ranging from roughly 1.5 to 5 centimetres in diameter. The class 3 designation indicates a relatively modest trackway, smaller in ambition than the great prehistoric road-building projects found elsewhere in Irish bogland, but no less telling about the people who needed it: someone, at some point, had to cross this ground regularly enough to make the effort of laying a road worthwhile.