It is a togher, a type of wooden road laid across waterlogged or boggy ground in prehistoric and early medieval Ireland, built from timber planks, brushwood, or woven rods to allow people and animals to cross terrain that would otherwise have been impassable. This particular example is classified as a class 3 togher, a category that generally denotes a less elaborate form of construction than the great plank roads found elsewhere in the Irish midlands, but no less useful to those who once depended on it.

The trackway was noted during a field survey in 1988, with its north-south orientation recorded in correspondence from B. Raftery, a leading authority on Irish bog roads. Ireland's midland bogs have preserved dozens of such toghers in remarkable condition, the anaerobic, acidic environment of the peat preventing the decay that would long since have destroyed timber left in open air. Derryshannoge sits within a landscape that was, for much of prehistory and the early medieval period, threaded through with these engineered crossings, each one representing a practical solution to the challenge of moving through a waterlogged world. The fact that this one survives, even as a buried trace, is largely owing to the same bog that once made the journey necessary in the first place.