It is a togher, a term for the ancient timber trackways that Irish communities laid across wet ground to make otherwise impassable bogland traversable. These structures range from simple arrangements of branches thrown down in a hurry to carefully engineered roads of split planks and pegged rails, and the one at Derrynaskea falls into what archaeologists classify as class 3, a category that typically denotes a more substantial and deliberately constructed form.

The togher was noted during a field survey in 1988, its orientation recorded as running ENE to WSW, a bearing that would have aligned travellers broadly between the northeast and southwest. That alignment is the only geometric detail we have, but it is enough to suggest a purposeful route rather than a casual crossing, connecting somewhere specific with somewhere else, across ground that would otherwise have swallowed a person to the knee. Ireland's boglands have preserved dozens of such trackways in extraordinary condition, the anaerobic, waterlogged environment arresting decay in wood that might otherwise have vanished millennia ago. The survey information was communicated by B. Raftery, a name well known in Irish wetland archaeology, and the site was later compiled as part of a wider effort to document the country's bogland heritage through the Irish Archaeological Wetland Unit at University College Dublin.