It is easy to overlook the significance of such a modest measurement, but what it represents is a piece of deliberate engineering laid down in a wet and unstable landscape long before any modern road surface was imagined.

The structure is a togher, a type of wooden trackway built across boggy or waterlogged ground to allow people and animals to pass where the earth alone would not hold. This example is classed as a class 3 togher, meaning it was constructed from brushwood rather than more substantial timber planking. The builders used a mixture of small and large brushwood, with occasional roundwood pieces worked in, and laid these elements both longitudinally and transversely, a technique that distributes weight and lends the surface a degree of stability underfoot. The peat bog did what it has done for thousands of years across Ireland: it preserved the organic material in near-airless, acidic conditions that would have rotted the same wood within decades on dry land. The exposed section, 11.6 metres in length and 0.45 metres across, gives only a partial picture of what may once have been a longer route threading through the wetland.