What has appeared is not a road in any familiar sense, but a togher, the Irish term for a bog road, built from roundwood and brushwood laid across waterlogged ground to make it passable. Such structures were a practical solution to a landscape that was, for much of the year, effectively impassable, and they turn up across the Irish midlands wherever bogs have been cut or surveyed with sufficient care.

The Pallasboy togher was recorded during the 2013 Reassessment Peatland Survey, which examined industrial peatlands across the country for surviving archaeological material. Two separate sightings of timber elements came to light on opposing banks of a drain. The first grouping, designated Sighting A, consisted of a scatter of roundwood and brushwood pieces oriented roughly northeast to southwest. Sighting B, on the other side of the drain, showed fragmentary brushwood running on a different axis, west-northwest to east-southeast. The bog itself is a Sphagnum-rich pool peat, poorly humified and dense with cottongrass, the kind of saturated, oxygen-poor environment that preserves organic material with remarkable fidelity. A fragment of alder wood from the site was submitted for AMS radiocarbon dating, a technique that measures the decay of carbon isotopes in organic material to estimate age, and returned a calibrated date of approximately AD 887 to 1011. That places the construction of the trackway somewhere in the later ninth or early tenth century, a period of considerable movement and activity across Ireland, when such bog roads would have served as vital links across otherwise hostile terrain.