It was not a monument in any conventional sense, no wall, no tomb, no enclosure, but a solitary timber, about twenty-two centimetres wide and eight centimetres deep, visible only because it had been exposed in the cut face of a drain.

The plank came to light in 2006 during a fieldwalking survey of the Bord na Móna peatlands in the Littleton group of bogs, a stretch of midland bog landscape that straddles the Tipperary and Kilkenny border. The survey, carried out under licence by Archaeological Development Services, covered Derryville bog specifically, where the oak timber was recorded at a site catalogued as part of that broader investigation. Radiocarbon dating placed its origin in the period 300 to 220 BC, which falls within the Irish Iron Age, a time when timber structures of various kinds, from trackways that allowed movement across boggy ground to platforms and enclosures, were occasionally built at the margins of wetlands. Whether this particular plank was part of a trackway, a platform, or something else entirely cannot be said with confidence; the record notes only that it was orientated northeast to southwest and was already in a poor state of preservation when found. The bog that had concealed it for so long had not, in the end, kept it well.