Hurdles of this kind are panels of interlaced rods and upright stakes, used in wetland contexts for everything from trackways to field boundaries, their survival dependent on the oxygen-free conditions that bog environments uniquely provide. What is striking here is not simply that it survived, but how well: the surrounding Sphagnum pool peat, almost completely undecomposed, had effectively paused decay altogether.

The structure came to light during the 2013 Re-assessment Peatland Survey, when brushwood elements were spotted in a drain face, oriented east to west in two or three layers, with a further north-to-south layer above them. A subsequent excavation, carried out under licence 14E0296, revealed the hurdle panel in fuller detail: 2.68 metres long, between 0.13 and 0.8 metres wide, built around three northeast-to-southwest oriented sails of elm and ash with densely woven rods between them. Accelerator mass spectrometry dating of an ash fragment placed its construction somewhere between 411 and 283 BC, placing it firmly in the Irish Iron Age. A loose scatter of hazel and birch brushwood found at the southwestern edge of the cutting may represent a separate, later episode of activity rather than part of the original structure.