Wetland platforms of this kind were built directly into boggy or marshy terrain, sometimes as working surfaces, sometimes as access points across otherwise impassable ground. The bog's anaerobic conditions, essentially its lack of oxygen, are what kept the wood intact across more than two millennia.

A field survey of Derryville Bog, carried out in 1999 by Gowen, recorded these nineteen structures clustered within the one site. Most were built from a combination of brushwood and roundwood, the kind of material readily cut from the woodland edges that would have surrounded such bogland in prehistory. In a handful of cases, small anchoring pegs were driven in to hold the structure in place, and two of the platforms incorporated woven brushwood, a more deliberate construction technique that suggests some platforms were built with care rather than simply laid down as a quick crossing. Radiocarbon dates obtained from four of the platforms span a considerable range of time. The earliest dated example falls within the Late Bronze Age, roughly 792 to 526 BC, while another belongs to the Iron Age, between 351 and 120 BC, indicating that people were returning to this boggy ground and building within it across several centuries. Wood identification at nine of the sites revealed a familiar palette of native species: alder, ash, birch, hazel, and willow, all trees well suited to wet ground and all still common in Irish hedgerows and woodland margins today.