It belongs to a category known as a togher, a type of ancient trackway built across wet or marshy ground using timber, brushwood, or other organic material laid down to make passage possible where the ground would otherwise swallow a traveller whole. Class 3 tогhers are among the more rudimentary in construction, typically composed of loosely arranged organic material rather than the carefully engineered plank roads that occasionally emerge from Irish bogs in a remarkable state of preservation.

This particular togher was noted during a field survey in 1988, the record attributed to B. Raftery, a name well known in Irish archaeological circles in connection with bogroad research. The Irish midlands, of which Longford forms a part, are laced with such features, most of them dating to the Bronze Age or Iron Age, though some are medieval. Bogs preserve organic material with extraordinary fidelity, meaning that timbers buried for thousands of years can emerge still bearing tool marks, bark, and in some cases the very wedges used to pin them in place. The Derryad togher has not yielded that kind of detailed analysis in what little has been recorded about it, but its existence points to the same fundamental reality: people have been crossing this landscape, negotiating its wetness, for a very long time.