At Ballybeg, fieldwalking across a stretch of bog revealed several of these structures, known as toghers, distributed across an area roughly 165 metres north to south and 202 metres east to west. A togher is a causeways or road laid across wet or boggy ground, typically constructed from split or roundwood timbers placed end to end or side by side, sometimes dating back thousands of years. The fact that multiple examples were found clustered within a single area suggests this was not an isolated crossing point but a place where people returned repeatedly, navigating the bog along established routes.

Bog environments preserve organic material with unusual fidelity, which is precisely why toghers survive at all. Ordinarily, timber rots; submerged in the cold, acidic, oxygen-poor conditions of a raised bog, it can endure for millennia. The Ballybeg examples were identified by the Irish Archaeological Wetland Unit, based at UCD, during fieldwork that formed part of wider survey work across Ireland's midland and western bogs. What the fieldwalkers found, however, was already under threat. The toghers were in the process of being destroyed by peat milling, the industrial harvesting of bog that strips away layer after layer of accumulated organic material, taking with it anything the bog had preserved.