This is a togher, a timber trackway laid across wet or boggy ground to allow passage where the land would otherwise swallow a traveller whole. The Corlea example is a class 1 togher, meaning it was constructed to a substantial standard: transverse planks of split oak laid closely together across a substructure of longitudinal roundwood runners, the whole thing stretching nearly half a kilometre and wide enough for two people to walk abreast. What makes it quietly extraordinary is not just its age but the precision that survives in its details, the carefully worked chisel-pointed brushwood ends, the intact original toolmarks on the planking, and the scatter of hazelnut shells tucked between the timbers like the discarded snack of someone who paused here in the Neolithic and never returned.

When the trackway was first recorded in 1989, it measured 435 metres in length and just over two metres wide, oriented roughly northeast to southwest. Radiocarbon dating placed its construction between approximately 3362 and 3369 BC, a remarkably tight date range for material of this age. By the time it was reinspected a decade later, the visible extent had grown to 480 metres, running across 31 fields in a northwest to southeast orientation, the difference in recorded alignment likely reflecting the complex, slightly shifting course of the structure across the bog surface. A single flat stone, modest in size, had been deliberately incorporated into the surface of the track at one point, a detail that resists easy explanation. Most of the structure by 1999 was badly degraded, the result of peat milling, the industrial cutting of bog for fuel, which had sheared away the upper surfaces of many planks while leaving the worked ends largely untouched.