What the machine had grazed against was not a stray branch or a piece of windfall timber, but a deliberate human construction, laid down in the bog and swallowed by it long ago.

The exposed material measured just 1.2 metres in length and 0.6 metres in width, but what it lacked in scale it made up for in clarity of form. Four principal rods, each between three and six centimetres in diameter, lay parallel and closely set, extending further under the milled surface as though the structure continued beyond what could be seen. A fifth piece of roundwood angled away diagonally into the bog, and smaller fragments of brushwood and twigs were scattered among them. The arrangement, documented by Dunne in 1999, pointed to the remains of a peatland platform, the kind of low wooden structure that people built across boggy or waterlogged ground, either to create a stable surface for movement or to provide a working area in a landscape that would otherwise have been too soft to use. Such platforms are known from Irish bogs going back thousands of years, preserved by the acidic, oxygen-poor conditions of the peat in a way that wood almost never survives in drier ground.