Occasionally, drainage work cuts through centuries of compressed organic material and exposes something altogether unexpected, not a grand monument or a buried hoard, but something far quieter: a thin horizontal layer of small brushwood that was once, almost certainly, somewhere people walked or worked.

What came to light here was a compact band of uniform small branches, roughly eighty centimetres wide and less than a tenth of a metre thick, lying flat in the bog. The individual pieces measured between about one and a half and four and a half centimetres in diameter, and around twenty of them were visible in the exposed section faces, running at roughly right angles to the line of a drain. There was no evidence of any cutting or shaping; the wood appears to have been used as it was found. The arrangement is consistent with a hurdle, which is a woven panel of branches used as a portable surface, or more broadly with the remains of a peatland platform, a structure laid down to create a stable surface or crossing point in otherwise waterlogged ground. Corlea is already known for one of the most significant examples of Iron Age bog road construction in Europe, a nearby timber trackway that once carried traffic across the midland mires, so the presence of further, more modest traces of human activity in the same landscape is not entirely surprising. This particular find was recorded by Dunne in 1999, under reference 99LBW0023A, as part of a wider programme of monitoring in the area.