It was roughly seven metres long and barely wide enough for a single person to walk without stepping off the edge, yet it was constructed with enough care and craft that it survived, buried in wet peat, for more than three thousand years. This is a togher, a type of ancient trackway laid across boggy or waterlogged ground to allow people and animals to move through terrain that would otherwise swallow them. The Derryoghil example is a modest one, but modest does not mean careless.

Recorded in 1988 and classified as a class 3 togher, the structure measured 7.3 metres long, 0.6 metres wide, and only about five centimetres thick. It ran roughly east-south-east to west-north-west and was made from three woven hurdles laid end to end. Hurdles, in this context, are pre-made panels of interlaced wood, flexible enough to be prepared elsewhere and carried to the site. The weaving technique was a simple under-over pattern using hazel and ash, while birch and ash roundwood served as the sails, the upright or edge stakes that hold the woven material in place. Many of these sails still bore fine toolmarks, the direct traces of Bronze Age woodworking. Radiocarbon dating placed the structure between approximately 1369 and 1023 BC, a period when the Irish midlands were already well acquainted with the challenge of crossing their vast raised bogs. The dating was published by the archaeologist Barry Raftery, who documented many such trackways across the Irish bogland landscape during the late twentieth century.