A togher, as such structures are known in Irish archaeology, is essentially a causeway built across wet or boggy ground, constructed by laying timber and brushwood to create a stable path where none would otherwise be possible. This particular example, running north to south for at least one and a half kilometres through the bog northeast of Clontuskert Priory, came to light only in 1946 when Land Commission drainage operations cut a series of trenches through the peat. What those trenches revealed was a carefully engineered structure: a double row of parallel oak logs set in a bed of brushwood on a layer of gravel, roughly seventy centimetres wide, with vertical pointed hazelwood stakes driven in at each end to hold the whole assembly together.

The circumstances of its discovery tell you something about how much of this landscape remains unread. Prendergast, writing in 1946, recorded the find in some detail, and the local tradition that surrounded it proved equally suggestive. The togher is believed to have connected Clontuskert Priory, an Augustinian house to the south, with Pollboy Church to the north, a route that would point towards a medieval origin. The folklorically charged names attached to the area add further texture: Egan, writing in 1960, noted references to a nearby 'monks pass', a 'monk's well', and something called the 'Priest's kish', the last of these a kish being a type of wicker basket or frame, though its precise significance here is unclear. None of these features retain any visible surface trace today.

Above ground, there is almost nothing to see. A very slight grassed-over ridge follows the line of the togher, most legible towards its southern end, but you would need to know what you were looking for. The oak and hazel that once formed the road remain preserved in the anaerobic conditions of the bog, invisible and largely intact, which is precisely why such structures survive at all. The bog that obscured it also kept it.