It was never a grand thoroughfare. Excavation uncovered a wooden trackway, a togher, consisting of runners, pegs, and some brushwood, with no finished surface to speak of. A togher is simply a timber road laid across wet or boggy ground, a practical solution to terrain that would otherwise swallow a traveller whole. This one was already in a disturbed state when archaeologists found it, but enough remained to establish what it once was.

What makes the Killoran togher quietly remarkable is its age. Radiocarbon dating has placed its construction somewhere in the period 795 to 395 BC, putting it firmly in the Irish Iron Age. That spans four centuries during which people were crossing this particular stretch of bogland with enough regularity to warrant laying down a road. The bog itself, by preserving organic material that would otherwise have rotted away centuries ago, is the reason any of this survives at all. Bogs across Ireland have yielded trakways of this kind, some spectacularly preserved, and they represent some of the oldest engineered routes in the country. The Killoran example may be fragmentary, but it sits within that same tradition of communities solving the problem of moving people and goods across a landscape that resisted easy movement.