Not a road in any sense we would immediately recognise, but a togher, a timber trackway built across wet ground to make passage possible where the earth would otherwise swallow a person whole. This particular example is a class 2 togher, a category defined by its construction method: longitudinal roundwood timbers, occasional wooden pegs to hold things in place, and a brushwood substructure packed beneath to distribute weight across the soft bog surface. It is, in other words, a piece of ancient civil engineering, modest in its materials and quietly sophisticated in its logic.

Radiocarbon dating places the construction of the Derryoghil togher somewhere between 1617 and 1433 BC, deep in the Middle Bronze Age, when the boglands of the Irish midlands were already being threaded with these timber pathways. The trackway runs east to west and, at the time of its original recording, measured a minimum of five metres in length, around 1.2 metres wide, and just over ten centimetres deep. When inspected again in 1999, more of the structure had become visible or accessible, and the full exposed section measured eighteen metres long, two metres wide, and about forty centimetres thick, a figure that reflects the cumulative depth of the brushwood layers rather than any single plank. The survival of organic material like this is entirely down to the anaerobic conditions of the bog, which exclude the oxygen that would otherwise allow timber to decay. Bogs are, in this respect, remarkable preservers of things people built and discarded and forgot.