These structures, essentially bundles of cut branches and woody material woven or stacked to create a firm surface over soft terrain, were once a practical necessity across Ireland's midland bogs, allowing people and animals to move through landscapes that would otherwise have been impassable. What makes this one worth noting is less its scale than its quiet obscurity, a piece of engineering folded into the peat and largely forgotten until modern archaeology brought it back to light.

The togher at Baunmore came to attention in 1995, when researchers from the Irish Archaeological Wetland Unit at University College Dublin were carrying out a pilot survey of the Littleton Works, a broad wetland area that straddles parts of Tipperary and Kilkenny. Bog surveys of this kind tend to be painstaking work, reading the landscape for subtle signs of disturbance or organic material preserved by the anaerobic conditions that peat provides. Brushwood toghers are particularly fragile finds; the wood survives only because the bog has kept oxygen away from it, sometimes for centuries or even millennia. The 1995 survey was exploratory in nature, intended to establish what the Littleton Works might contain, and the discovery of the togher was among its results.