Found at a depth of roughly half a metre to just under a metre below the surface, the pieces are thought to be the remnants of a togher, a type of wooden trackway or road laid across boggy ground to make it passable. Toghers were built across Ireland for centuries, sometimes millennia, and the anaerobic, waterlogged conditions of peat bog are among the few environments capable of preserving organic material across such timescales.

The site sits on rough pasture overlooking the valley of the Adrigole River to the south, and the boggy terrain here would once have presented a real obstacle to movement across the mountain. One of the recovered timber pieces measured 1.1 metres in length, 0.15 metres wide, and 0.07 metres thick, and was identified as oak by the Archaeology Department at University College Cork. Oak was a practical choice for such construction, being both durable and widely available in early medieval and prehistoric Ireland. The planks described as cut suggest deliberate shaping rather than rough-hewn timber, which hints at a degree of craft in whoever laid this route, though the date of the togher remains unknown. The bog itself runs to a depth of between 1 and 1.8 metres at this location, meaning the timbers have been sitting in peat for long enough to become one with the landscape.