But this particular band of material, barely three centimetres in average diameter and exposed across a width of roughly two and a half metres in a single drain face, is the surviving trace of an ancient togher, a road of sorts laid across soft or waterlogged ground to allow passage where the earth would otherwise swallow you whole. Toghers were built in layers of timber, brushwood, or other organic material pressed into boggy terrain, and they range from substantial engineered structures to rougher, more improvised crossings. This one falls into the latter category.

When examined by archaeologists in 1999, the brushwood forming this togher showed no sign of woodworking, meaning it had not been shaped or prepared before being laid down. The arrangement was jumbled rather than ordered, making it difficult to establish which direction the road originally ran. The two principal orientations recorded were north-south and east-west, suggesting either that the material had shifted over time in the bog, or that the togher itself changed direction, or simply that its original alignment had been obscured by centuries of compression and disturbance. The togher was visible only in the east face of the drain in which it appeared, not in the opposite face, which limited what could be concluded about its extent or route across the landscape. Corlea is already known as an area of significant bogroad archaeology, most famously for a large Iron Age trackway of a much grander type preserved nearby, so this rougher, less-worked example sits within a broader pattern of ancient movement across the midland bogs.