A togher is a timber trackway laid across wet or boggy ground, a practical solution to the Irish midlands landscape that appears across the archaeological record from the Neolithic onward. This particular example, running north to south and measuring about 14.5 metres in length and up to a metre deep, is unusual not for its existence but for its layered complexity: four distinct layers of brushwood, roundwood, split timbers and twigs, stacked up to twenty pieces deep in places, each layer subtly different from the one below it in composition, technique, and weight of material.

Radiocarbon dating revealed that the basal layer was constructed somewhere between 970 and 800 cal BC, placing its earliest phase in the Late Bronze Age, while material from the uppermost layer dated to between 350 and 20 cal BC, well into the Iron Age. Almost 600 worked pieces were recovered, most bearing the marks of iron axes, and about 70% of the assemblage showed toolmarks of one kind or another. Twenty-six split timbers had been converted using a range of splitting techniques, including radial and tangential cuts, suggesting a degree of considered timber preparation rather than opportunistic felling. Among the more precise finds were a split-ash timber fitted with six rectangular notches and thirteen dowels, and the fragmentary remains of a hazel withy, a flexible twisted-wood binding, recovered from the upper layers. Towards the northern end, a dense cluster of around 75 pieces of brushwood, some set nearly upright, suggested a crude structural feature, possibly a reinforcing element or small revetment. At the southern end, the togher merged with a second, east-west trackway, their timbers becoming so interleaved that the longitudinals of one were indistinguishable from the transverses of the other. Further toghers, platforms, and other structures were identified in close proximity, pointing to a wet landscape that was repeatedly crossed, managed, and returned to over many generations.