In a boggy corner of County Kildare, at Coolcarrigan, the scattered remnants of an ancient road survive just barely enough to be recognised for what they once were. The structure is a togher, a type of prehistoric or early medieval trackway built from timber and brushwood laid across waterlogged or marshy ground to make it passable. What remains at this particular site is fragmentary: a narrow strip roughly 72 metres long and only a metre wide, preserving a few pieces of hazel brushwood in a haphazard arrangement, their diameter ranging from about one to two and a half centimetres. The whole thing lies just eight centimetres below the surface.

Toghers were functional, often ingeniously constructed roads, built by communities who needed reliable crossings through the bogs that covered much of midland Ireland. Hazel was a commonly used material, lightweight and flexible, and the presence of it here in such slender pieces suggests these are the degraded traces of something once more substantial. The disorganised scatter of the surviving wood points to a structure that has been largely destroyed, whether by peat cutting, agricultural work, or the slow processes of decomposition. Notably, there is also some evidence of burning recorded at the site, though whether this relates to the original construction, a later episode of damage, or something else entirely is not clear from what survives.