Somewhere beneath the working bogland at Gilltown in County Kildare, a Bronze Age road lies preserved in peat, built by people who left no written record but who clearly needed to get somewhere. A togher, as these ancient bog roads are known, is essentially a timber trackway laid across soft or waterlogged ground to make it passable, and the one at Gilltown is a substantial example: over 220 metres long, and in places more than four metres wide.

The structure was identified at eleven separate locations across a Bord na Móna bog, appearing at different depths depending on where along its northeast to southwest alignment it was examined. At its northern end it turned up deep in the cut faces of drainage channels, while further southwest it emerged at or very near the surface of the bog. Its construction varied considerably along that length, shifting from simple single planks in some stretches to dense layered arrangements of roundwood timbers, planks, brushwood, and gravel, with occasional deposits of marl, a calcium-rich clay sometimes used as a stabilising material. That variation in technique probably reflects the changing conditions underfoot as the builders worked their way across the bog, adapting the road's structure to whatever the ground demanded. Radiocarbon dating placed its construction between 1490 and 1200 BC, which puts it firmly in the middle Bronze Age, a period when bog trackways were being built across Ireland and Britain with considerable skill and, in some cases, considerable effort.