What gave it away was a drainage ditch cut through the field, which sliced open the peat and exposed the woodwork in cross-section, sitting roughly a quarter of a metre down.

When surveyors examined the exposed face in 2006, they found a densely packed layer of brushwood and roundwood, the kind of timber road known as a toghér, a term for the causeways and trackways that Iron Age and early medieval communities built to cross the soft, waterlogged ground of Irish bogs. The construction here was about ninety per cent brushwood, the thin, flexible stems and branches that would have been bundled or laid thickly to create a stable surface over ground that would otherwise swallow a foot or a cart wheel. The roundwood elements were slightly more substantial, ranging from five to eight centimetres in diameter. Every piece was aligned on an east-west axis, suggesting a deliberate and purposeful route rather than opportunistic dumping of timber. The peat surrounding the structure contained well-humified Sphagnum moss, along with traces of heather and cottongrass, plants that indicate the trackway was laid at the edge or base of a shallow pool. Radiocarbon dating placed its construction between 420 and 390 BC, which puts it squarely in the Irish Iron Age, a period when similar routes were being laid across bogland across the country to connect communities, farmsteads, and grazing grounds.