They are easy to overlook, easy to dismiss. Yet each one carries tooling marks, the cut traces of whoever shaped and drove them into the wetland ground, and that detail transforms them from natural debris into deliberate human work.

The stakes were recorded in 1992 as part of a survey carried out by the Irish Archaeological Wetland Unit, a programme dedicated to documenting archaeological monuments in and around Irish lakes and boglands. The three uprights range in height from 0.76 to 1.11 metres and are slender, between two and three centimetres in diameter. They run on a north-east to south-west alignment. What they once supported, marked, or secured is not recorded. A fish trap, a boundary, a mooring point, the edge of a platform; wetland archaeology rarely offers tidy answers. What the peat does offer is preservation, and in this case it has held onto the stakes, and their tooling marks, long enough for someone to notice them a generation ago and write them down.