The find is modest in scale, a roundwood just six centimetres in diameter, but what distinguishes it is the clear evidence of toolmarks left by whoever shaped or cut it, marks that survived only because the waterlogged, oxygen-poor conditions of a peatland are extraordinarily effective at preserving organic material that would otherwise rot away within decades.

The timber came to light in 1995, when the Irish Archaeological Wetland Unit, based at University College Dublin, carried out a pilot survey of the Littleton Works, a peatland area that takes its name from the nearby Littleton Bog, one of the more extensively studied raised bogs in Ireland. Wetland surveys of this kind were methodical and painstaking, involving the systematic examination of exposed bog faces and drainage channels for any traces of ancient structures or artefacts. The toolmarked roundwood found at Baunmore is catalogued as a peatland structure, a broad category that can encompass anything from a simple plank walkway or togher laid across boggy ground to allow passage, through to the remains of more substantial timber platforms or enclosures. The precise nature of what this particular piece once belonged to is not recorded, but the toolmarks themselves are unambiguous evidence that it was worked by human hands before being lost to the bog.