When monitoring work was carried out during the building of the N8 Rathcormac-Fermoy Bypass in 2004, an exposed section of Ballyoran Bog revealed the remains of a togher, a brushwood trackway of the kind prehistoric communities built to cross soft or waterlogged ground by laying bundles of rods and roundwood timber across the surface. The surviving section was modest, roughly 2.6 metres along its northwest-southeast axis and 1.2 metres across, found about 1.5 metres below the bog surface, resting directly on the underlying clay. Much of it had already been cut through by machinery before it could be recorded.

Above the trackway itself lay a subrectangular platform made from two layers of brushwood, which the excavator, Tierney, interpreted as a rough working surface used during the trackway's construction. A radiocarbon date obtained from one of these layers returned a result of approximately 8280 to 7965 BC, a figure that created more questions than it answered. That date would place the wood in the Mesolithic period, predating any known human activity in the region, and Tierney's explanation is that old, already-preserved timber may have been incorporated into the build, skewing the result. It is a reminder of how bogs, which preserve organic material with unusual fidelity, can complicate the very evidence they protect: wood that had lain in waterlogged conditions for centuries before being reused would carry its original carbon signature rather than the date of construction. About 390 metres to the north, a fulacht fia was also excavated nearby; a fulacht fia is a type of Bronze Age cooking or industrial site, typically identified by a mound of burnt and cracked stone beside a trough.