It is a togher, a timber trackway laid across soft or waterlogged ground to allow people and animals to cross terrain that would otherwise have been impassable. Tоghers are among the more quietly remarkable survivals in the Irish archaeological record; built from wood, they were preserved precisely because the anaerobic, waterlogged conditions of a bog deny oxygen to the bacteria that would otherwise break organic material down over centuries.

This particular example is classified as a class 3 togher, a designation within a typological system developed to categorise the varying methods of construction found across Irish wetlands. Class 3 tоghers are generally characterised by a more substantial or structured form of timber laying compared to simpler plank or brushwood trackways. The site at Derrynaskea was noted during a field survey in 1988, with its east-west orientation recorded by B. Raftery, one of the foremost scholars of Irish Iron Age archaeology and wetland roads. The survey was carried out as part of the broader work of the Irish Archaeological Wetland Unit, which was based at University College Dublin and dedicated to systematically documenting the extraordinary concentration of bogland archaeological sites across the Irish midlands, a landscape that had been concealing these structures for potentially thousands of years.