It is not a road in any dramatic sense, no cobbled surface or raised causeway, but a carefully laid platform of brushwood overlaid with two woven hurdle panels, pressed into wetland ground to allow passage across terrain that would otherwise have swallowed a person whole. These structures are known as toghers, from the Irish tóchar, meaning a road or causeway built across boggy ground, and they appear across the Irish midlands in considerable numbers, each one a small record of the practical intelligence required to move through a waterlogged landscape.

The Derryoghil togher was constructed sometime between 1258 and 941 BC, a date established through radiocarbon analysis of the organic material preserved in the bog. That places it firmly in the Bronze Age, when Ireland's boglands were already being actively managed and crossed by communities who clearly understood the ground they were working with. The structure ran in a north-west to south-east orientation and measured at least 5.1 metres in length, 1.4 metres wide, and approximately 0.3 metres deep. Its foundation consisted of a dense layer of slender brushwood, the individual elements ranging from roughly two to five centimetres in diameter, upon which the hurdle panels were laid to create a stable walking surface. When the site was inspected in 1999, what remained exposed was a compacted longitudinal brushwood platform around 1.6 metres long and just over a metre wide, with the constituent elements running in a roughly east-north-east to west-south-west direction, slightly offset from the togher's overall alignment. The research was documented by Raftery, whose published accounts in 1990 and 1996 remain the primary record of the structure.