It is less than three metres long and barely wider than a pair of shoulders, yet it survives as physical evidence of a journey someone considered worth making, repeatedly, more than two thousand years ago.

A togher is a wooden trackway laid across boggy or waterlogged terrain, a low-tech but effective solution to the problem of moving through Ireland's extensive midland wetlands. This particular example was recorded in 1988 and measures 2.85 metres in length, 0.55 metres in width, and roughly 0.1 metres in depth. It ran on an east-west orientation and was constructed from hazel roundwood, the straight flexible stems of young hazel trees, bundled together with brushwood. Radiocarbon dating placed its construction somewhere between 760 and 406 BC, a span that covers the transition from the late Bronze Age into the Iron Age in Ireland. The reference figure is 2440 plus or minus 20 radiocarbon years, catalogue number GrN-16641, published by the archaeologist Barry Raftery in 1996. It is a small structure by any measure, but its modest dimensions are part of the point: this was a local, practical crossing, not a ceremonial road or a major route, just a few metres of engineered ground that kept feet dry over a patch of bog that mattered to whoever lived nearby.