A single piece of worked roundwood, roughly 1.6 metres long and about seven centimetres in diameter, was recovered from the peatland and logged as a possible structure. The conclusion reached was that the evidence was insufficient to accept it as the remains of an archaeological monument. And yet here it sits, in the archive of things that were found and considered and left unresolved.

Worked roundwood, wood that has been shaped or trimmed by human hands, turns up with some regularity in Irish wetlands. Peat bogs preserve organic material with remarkable fidelity, and the same anaerobic, acidic conditions that dissolve bone and textile will keep a sharpened stake or a split plank intact for centuries or even millennia. The difficulty is that a single piece, stripped of context, tells very little. It might be the remnant of a trackway, a platform, a fish trap, a fence post, or something carried onto the bog and dropped without ceremony. Without associated timbers, without stratigraphy, without radiocarbon dating, there is no way to say what it was part of, or when, or why. The former Irish Archaeological Wetland Unit at University College Dublin, which gathered data on sites of this kind across the country, logged it faithfully all the same.