A togher, to use the Irish term, is essentially a trackway or road laid across boggy or waterlogged ground, typically constructed from timber and brushwood to spread weight and allow passage where the ground would otherwise swallow a traveller whole. This particular example survived only because the anaerobic, oxygen-poor conditions of the bog prevented the wood from decaying, the same quality that has preserved bog bodies, butter, and countless other organic materials across Ireland's midlands.

The site came to light during a 2013 Re-assessment Peatland Survey, which identified closely packed roundwood and brushwood near the drain edge of a field surface in Killavally. A subsequent excavation, carried out under licence, opened a single cutting into the peat and revealed a tightly arranged layer of alder, ash, birch, hazel, and willow timbers, oriented east to west and bordered by north-south brushwood elements, all within an area measuring roughly 2.85 by 2.4 metres. A fragment of alder was submitted for AMS radiocarbon dating, an accelerator mass spectrometry technique that can date tiny samples of organic material with considerable precision, and returned a calibrated date of between AD 1291 and 1397, placing the trackway firmly in the late medieval period. Several pieces showed clear signs of deliberate woodworking, with chisel-cut ends and wedge points with flat facets, suggesting skilled preparation rather than casual bundling of available material. A secondary cluster of regularly shaped north-south rods was found just to the west of the main structure, sitting closer to the surface and possibly serving a different, related purpose. The peat matrix surrounding the timbers, a fibrous, moderately humified Sphagnum moss peat interspersed with cotton-grass, heather, and herbaceous roots, records the bog environment as it was when the road was built and in the centuries since.