It was not a grand road, barely a metre wide, just a single layer of cobble-sized stones set down across the soft ground to allow passage where passage would otherwise have been treacherous. The peat eventually swallowed it whole, and there it remained until 1984, when cutting exposed a cross-section of the trackway lying nearly a metre beneath the bog surface. What emerged was a modest but genuinely ancient piece of practical engineering, measuring 7.4 metres east to west and averaging 0.8 metres in width.

Bog trackways of this kind, sometimes called toghers, were a common solution to the problem of moving people or animals across Ireland's extensive wetlands during prehistory. They range from simple arrangements of brushwood to more substantial constructions using planks or stones, and they tend to survive precisely because the waterlogged, oxygen-poor conditions of a bog suppress the decay that would destroy organic material elsewhere. At Cool, a radiocarbon date obtained from a peat sample taken at the level of the trackway returned a result of 3930 plus or minus 90 years before present, placing its construction somewhere in the late Neolithic or early Bronze Age. Then, in 1988, further peat-cutting some six metres to the south revealed something else entirely: a cluster of stones arranged in a rough basin shape, about 0.7 metres across, containing a deposit of charcoal. Mitchell, writing in 1989, interpreted this as a hearth. Whether it was used by travellers pausing along this small stone road, or whether it belongs to a more settled moment of occupation nearby, is not recorded, but the proximity of the two features is quietly suggestive.