It was not found by excavation in the traditional sense but spotted in a drain face, the cut edge of a drainage channel slicing through Derryville bog, where the layered timbers were simply exposed in cross-section. What makes it quietly remarkable is the regularity of its construction: roundwood poles and brushwood laid in an organised fashion, not simply thrown down, suggesting deliberate engineering rather than casual debris.

The structure was first identified in 1995 by the Irish Archaeological Wetland Unit, based at University College Dublin, during a pilot survey connected to the Littleton Works in the Bord na Móna industrial peatlands of County Kilkenny. It was surveyed more fully in 2006 as part of a broader fieldwalking programme across the Littleton group of bogs. Radiocarbon dating placed its construction at 1484 plus or minus nine years BC, which puts it in the Irish Bronze Age, a period when wetlands were frequently used as ritual and practical spaces, and timber platforms were sometimes built at the edges of lakes or bogs, perhaps as landing stages, fishing platforms, or places with ceremonial significance. The roundwood elements, ranging from about five to fifteen centimetres in diameter, were concentrated toward the upper part of the structure, with brushwood forming the lower layers. The wood was moderately well preserved within the peat, though the portions exposed to air in the drain face had begun to dry out and deteriorate, as organic material tends to do once the protective, oxygen-poor conditions of a bog are removed.