Nineteen of these platforms were identified during field survey of the bog, most of them assembled from combinations of brushwood and roundwood, the kind of readily available timber that would have been gathered from the surrounding landscape rather than shaped or milled. A few were more carefully made: three examples used small anchoring pegs to hold the structure in place, and two incorporated woven brushwood, a technique that suggests something more deliberate than rough expedience.

Radiocarbon dating places the construction of at least some of these platforms across a wide span of prehistory. One dates to the Late Bronze Age, somewhere between 792 and 526 BC, while another falls into the Iron Age, between 351 and 120 BC. Wetland platforms of this kind appear throughout Ireland and Britain during these periods, though their precise function is often unclear. They may have served as working surfaces for fishing or fowling, as staging points for movement across boggy ground, or possibly as places with a more ceremonial significance, since bogs were evidently regarded as meaningful, liminal spaces during later prehistory. At nine of the Derryville sites, the wood species could be identified: alder, ash, birch, hazel, and willow, all trees that would have grown in and around wet ground, chosen presumably because they were close to hand and, in some cases, naturally resistant to decay in waterlogged conditions.