They are modest in dimension, each no more than twelve centimetres wide and four centimetres deep, lying side by side and orientated north to south. What makes them worth noting is less their scale than their survival. Peat is an extraordinary preserving medium; its acidic, waterlogged, oxygen-poor conditions can hold organic material for centuries or even millennia in a condition that open air would destroy within decades. These two planks, whatever structure they once belonged to, have endured precisely because they sank into the bog.

They came to light during a fieldwalking survey of the Littleton group of bogs, a cluster of peatlands straddling Counties Tipperary, Kilkenny, and Laois. The survey was carried out as part of a broader effort to document archaeological material within the Bord na Móna industrial workings before extraction removed it. Jane Whitaker of Archaeological Development Services Ltd recorded the find, noting the good state of preservation of the two transverse and adjacent planks. Without further excavation or dendrochronological dating, it is not possible to say with certainty when the planks were laid or what they formed part of, though plank structures found in Irish bogland contexts range from prehistoric trackways to early medieval platforms and pathways, built to allow movement across otherwise impassable ground.