Roughly 1.6 metres beneath the shrunken surface of a County Kildare bog, workmen cutting drainage channels in 1955 exposed something that had been quietly waiting for centuries: a timber road. A togher, as such a structure is known in Irish, is an ancient trackway laid across soft or waterlogged ground, allowing people and perhaps livestock to cross terrain that would otherwise have been impassable. This one, near the western edge of a large expanse of bog at Drehid, was not the neatly engineered kind. It was roughly five metres wide and only about seventeen centimetres thick, its light branches laid crosswise on top of one another without any regular interlocking or weaving pattern. Elsewhere in the same drainage cuttings, larger hewn timbers also came to light, one measuring just over a metre in length.

The discovery came about through the operations of Bord na Móna, the Irish state body established to harvest peat from the midland bogs for fuel. Industrial-scale drainage and milling of that kind has, over the decades, exposed a remarkable number of archaeological features that had been sealed and preserved by the anaerobic conditions of the bog. In this case, it was B. O'Riordáin of the National Museum of Ireland who examined what the drainage works had uncovered and recorded its dimensions and construction. The detail about the bog surface being "shrunken" is worth pausing on: peat shrinks considerably as it dries out, which means the original depth at which the togher was laid would have been even greater, and the landscape through which ancient travellers once picked their way would have looked very different from the flat, industrial terrain that surrounds the site today.