A single fragile plank laid over a bed of worked hazel brushwood, the whole thing just over a metre wide and barely a finger's breadth deep, this is a togher, one of the oldest types of engineered pathway known in Ireland. Toghers were constructed across soft, waterlogged ground where ordinary walking was treacherous, the brushwood acting as a kind of flexible raft beneath the timber surface, distributing weight across ground that would otherwise swallow a traveller whole.

This particular example, recorded at Derrylough, runs on an east-north-east to west-south-west orientation. The hazel rods beneath the surface plank average around two centimetres in diameter, and the fact that they are described as worked indicates they were deliberately cut and prepared rather than gathered as windfall. Hazel was a practical choice for such construction: it is flexible, relatively slow to decay in anaerobic bog conditions, and would have been readily coppiced from nearby woodland. The overall dimensions, a width of 1.06 metres and a depth of just 0.09 metres, suggest something modest in scale, a local crossing rather than a major routeway, perhaps connecting a settlement to a field, a grazing ground, or a patch of drier land. The data for this structure was gathered by the Irish Archaeological Wetland Unit at University College Dublin, a body that spent years systematically documenting the extraordinary density of prehistoric and early historic wooden structures preserved in Irish peatlands.