Waterlogged, acidic, and starved of oxygen, bog preserves organic material that would otherwise rot away within a generation, which is why a modest arrangement of wooden poles and brushwood buried in the peat can survive for thousands of years and still carry meaningful information about how people moved through a landscape that was, for much of prehistory, genuinely difficult to cross.

What was found at Corlea is a togher, the Irish word for a trackway built across boggy ground. This particular example is classed as a type 3 togher, meaning it was constructed using roundwood laid longitudinally, that is, running along the direction of travel, combined with smaller brushwood beneath. When first recorded, eight to ten roundwood poles were visible lying on top of brushwood in the face of a drain cutting roughly west-southwest through the bog. Excavation gave more detail: the exposed section measured at least 1.7 metres in length, 1.2 metres in width, and 0.45 metres in depth, and the trackway runs on a north-northeast to south-southeast alignment. The roundwood and brushwood used in its construction measured around 0.12 metres in diameter, and the structure was probably originally supported underneath by transverse elements, cross-laid timbers that would have given the whole thing a degree of stability underfoot. Corlea is already well known as the site of one of Ireland's most spectacular bog roads, the great Iron Age oak trackway now partly on display at the Corlea Trackway Visitor Centre, and finds like this one serve as a reminder that the wetlands here were being negotiated by people across many different periods, each leaving their own modest engineering behind in the peat.