It survives as a togher, the Irish term for a timber trackway laid across soft or waterlogged ground, and it represents a remarkably precise piece of early engineering aimed at a very practical problem: how to move across terrain that would otherwise swallow you whole.

This particular togher is a class 3 example, meaning it was built from a combination of tightly packed roundwood and brushwood rather than heavier split or hewn planks. The roundwood timbers average around six centimetres in diameter, while the brushwood, made from ash and birch, runs slightly thinner at between two and three centimetres across. The whole structure was laid seven rods deep and measures 1.8 metres wide and roughly 0.2 metres in depth, compact dimensions that nonetheless represent a considerable investment of material and labour. The choice of ash and birch is telling; both are fast-growing, flexible, and historically among the most commonly worked timbers in Irish wetland construction. That the builders worked with what the local landscape provided is not incidental, it is the point.