Buried beneath the surface here, a small section of ancient roadway lay quietly waiting, partly exposed in a field drain, until excavators came to look more closely at what it actually was. What they found was a togher, the Irish term for a wooden trackway built across boggy or waterlogged ground, a form of engineering so commonplace in prehistoric and early medieval Ireland that hundreds of examples have been identified across the midlands.

This particular togher was first noted as a patch of exposed timber roughly ten metres long, visible where a drain had cut through the ground. Once excavated, it revealed a surprisingly considered piece of construction. The walking surface, between 1.6 and 1.75 metres wide, was made from loosely laid brushwood running lengthways, with roundwood placed along the edges to define and stabilise the margins. Beneath that upper layer sat a substructure of roundwood and brushwood arranged in transverse, diagonal, and longitudinal directions, and below that again, further small brushwood laid diagonally and lengthways. Wooden pegs were used to hold the edges of both the surface and the substructure in place. What is notable is the absence of any evidence for woodworking; the materials appear to have been used essentially as they came, without shaping or modification. By the time it was excavated and described by Dunne in 1999 and 2000, the remains were quite degraded and had been disturbed by milling, the mechanical cutting of peat that has removed so much of the archaeological record in the Irish midlands.