The structure they uncovered was a togher, a type of ancient wooden trackway built from brushwood laid across boggy terrain, and it dates to a period more than three thousand years ago.

What makes this particular togher notable is the detail recovered during excavation. Rather than a neatly engineered arrangement of planks or poles, the trackway was constructed from an irregular dump of brushwood, placed on top of a layer of burnt stone and charcoal. That burnt layer beneath suggests some deliberate preparation of the ground before the brushwood was laid down, though whether this was purely practical or carried some other significance is difficult to say. A collapsed oak found directly on top of the brushwood provided a radiocarbon date of 1212 BC, give or take nine years, placing the trackway firmly in the Late Bronze Age. The oak had not been part of the trackway itself; it had fallen onto the structure, making it a kind of accidental timestamp. The bogs of Ireland have preserved dozens of such trackways across the country, the anaerobic, waterlogged conditions slowing decay to a near-standstill and allowing organic material to survive for millennia. In that sense, the bogland that made this crossing necessary in the first place is also the reason any trace of it survived at all.