Not beams or posts, not the skeleton of a house or a causeway, just a loose scatter of thin roundwood and brushwood, preserved for roughly two thousand years in the cold anaerobic grip of Sphagnum pool peat, which is the particularly wet, poorly decomposed kind that forms in open boggy pools and is especially good at holding organic material intact. The pieces were small, ranging from eight centimetres to just over a metre in length, and a couple of centimetres in diameter at most. What they once added up to, no one can say with certainty.

The site first came to light during the 2013 Re-assessment Peatland Survey, when a drain face, essentially a cut section through the bog exposed during drainage or milling work, revealed three upright brushwood pegs and a dense cluster of six further brushwood pieces orientated on a north-west to south-east axis, sitting around 0.4 metres below the field surface. A formal excavation followed under licence, and a fragment of hazel was submitted for AMS dating, a precise radiocarbon technique that works on very small samples. The result placed the material in the period roughly spanning 39 BC to AD 83, which puts it in the late Iron Age or the earliest years of the early medieval period in Ireland. The only clear sign that human hands had worked any of this wood was a single flat faceted chisel point on one piece, a deliberate cut but one that shed no obvious light on what the structure, if it was a structure at all, was intended to be.