They were not the remnants of a medieval quay or a post-medieval landing stage. A radiocarbon date returned for one of the timbers placed it somewhere between 4661 and 4360 BC, which is to say the Mesolithic or early Neolithic period, a time when the people leaving traces along Irish waterways were hunters, fishers, and the earliest farmers, moving through the landscape in dugout log boats rather than wheeled vehicles.

The timbers ranged considerably in size, from half a metre to just over three metres in length, and varied in width and thickness in ways consistent with worked, rather than accidentally deposited, wood. Fourteen lay in the larger group, most of them parallel to one another; the smaller cluster of three showed a similar orientation in at least two of its pieces. The excavator, McDermott, was careful not to over-claim: the identification as a deliberate archaeological structure was not considered certain, but the arrangement and location prompted the suggestion that the most likely function would have been as a landing place for log boats, essentially a primitive jetty or staging point on the riverbank. Log boats, hollowed from single tree trunks, were the standard watercraft of prehistoric Ireland, and a simple timber platform or revetment would have made beaching or loading them considerably easier.

What makes these timbers quietly remarkable is not their size or preservation alone, but the ordinariness of what they may represent. If the interpretation holds, this was not a ceremonial site or a monument but a practical piece of river infrastructure, mundane in its purpose and extraordinary only in its age, a working edge of a prehistoric waterway that happened to survive beneath the gravel until a digger found it.