It is a togher, the Irish term for a timber trackway laid across boggy or unstable ground, and it was not rediscovered until 1973. What makes the find quietly arresting is not just the road itself but what came with it: a wooden beetle, meaning a large wooden mallet used for driving stakes or timbers into soft ground. The tool and the structure it helped build, preserved together in the anaerobic depths of the bog, offer a small, accidental record of someone at work.

The togher was found between nine and ten feet deep, partially resting on the bog itself and partially on the subsoil beneath it, suggesting it was laid at a time when the peat above it had not yet accumulated to anything like its present depth. Bogs build up slowly, sometimes only a millimetre or two per year, so the depth of this find points to considerable antiquity, though no precise date has been assigned to it in the available record. Derryville Bog sits in North Tipperary, a landscape that would have been threaded with such trackways in earlier centuries and millennia, as people and animals needed reliable routes across ground that was otherwise impassable. There is also a suggestion that this togher may be the same structure recorded elsewhere under a separate reference number, a reminder of how fragmentary and occasionally overlapping the archaeology of bog roads can be.