That ambiguity is precisely what makes it worth noting. When archaeologists returned to the site on 27 August 2007, they could find no trace of it at all, leaving behind a monument that exists, for now, more convincingly in the written record than in the landscape.

Wedge tombs are the most numerous megalithic tomb type in Ireland, built during the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age, roughly between 2500 and 2000 BC. The name describes their form: a roofed stone chamber that tapers in both width and height from one end to the other, typically oriented to face the setting sun in the south-west. The Tooreen example was small even by the modest standards of the type, its chamber measuring just 1.5 metres in length and narrowing from 1.15 metres at the western end to 0.7 metres at the eastern. Each side was formed by a single stone, and a low slab at the base of the southern side may have split away from it at some point. A further slab protruding from the bog surface, resting against the northern sidestone, was tentatively identified as a displaced roofstone. Slight traces of a covering mound survived to the north of the chamber. More intriguingly, pre-bog walls and an enclosure were recorded to the south-west of the tomb, suggesting some form of organised activity in the area before the peat began to accumulate and gradually swallow the site. The tomb and its associated features were catalogued by Seán Ó Nualláin in 1989.

What the 2007 visit confirms, quietly, is how effectively blanket bog can reclaim a site. The peat that once preserved these stones by sealing them may simply have continued its work, pulling the remaining fragments below a surface that gives nothing away.