It is sixty metres long and barely wide enough for a single person to walk with confidence, a strip of carefully laid timber crossing ground that was once too wet and treacherous to cross on foot.

This is a togher, the Irish word for a trackway built across boggy or waterlogged terrain. The practice is ancient, and Irish bogs have yielded examples spanning several thousand years, each one a small act of practical engineering carried out by communities who needed to move through a difficult landscape. The Derrygowna togher follows a northwest to southeast orientation and was constructed from longitudinal worked roundwood, thin poles of around six centimetres in diameter, laid lengthwise along the track and packed with brushwood of alder and hazel, the individual stems ranging from one and a half to three centimetres across. The whole structure sits only sixteen centimetres deep, a shallow but coherent platform just 1.2 metres wide. The choice of alder is telling; it is a wood long associated with wet ground in Ireland, resistant to decay when kept permanently waterlogged, which is part of why such structures survive at all. Hazel, flexible and easily worked, was a common material for the finer infill. Together they produced something functional, not monumental, a road built to solve a specific local problem rather than to impress.