What emerged was modest in scale, just one and a half metres long and two metres wide, but the precision of its construction suggested something deliberate and considered rather than accidental.

The structure is classified as a peatland platform, a form of timber foundation laid down in waterlogged or boggy ground, likely to provide a stable working surface or crossing point. When the site was first recorded, it showed closely set, parallel roundwood and brushwood, with three substantial roundwood timbers measuring between ten and fourteen centimetres in diameter. Excavation carried out in 2001 produced a date placing its construction somewhere between 16 BC and AD 2, firmly within the Iron Age. All of the timber was orientated north to south, and every cut end was flat-faceted, indicating that the wood had been worked with a metal tool. That detail is worth pausing on: the clean, precise cuts are physical evidence of iron technology at work, a craftsperson shaping timber with a blade rather than splitting or burning it to shape. The bog, by preserving the organic material over two millennia, has kept that small biographical detail intact.