It came to light not through excavation or academic survey but through the far more prosaic business of land reclamation, when a local farmer, deep-ploughing the bog, struck what he recognised as a roadway: roughly 2.5 metres wide, its surface laid with thin sandstone slabs. The road was not especially deep below the surviving bog surface, sitting at around 0.3 metres down, but by the time it was found, at least a metre of peat above it had already been stripped away. The full original burial depth was considerably greater.

The trackway was uncovered at intervals across a stretch of 200 to 300 metres, close to the southern bank of the Dalgin River. Bog roads of this kind, sometimes called togher in the Irish tradition, were a practical solution to the problem of crossing ground that was otherwise impassable. Builders would lay timber, stone, or other materials directly onto the bog surface, creating a firm path across what would have been sodden, yielding terrain. The use of sandstone slabs here rather than timber gives this example a particular solidity, and the roughly east-west alignment suggests it was connecting two points of some local significance rather than wandering with the landscape. What adds an interesting layer to the find is its proximity to a horizontal watermill recorded approximately 100 metres to the north-east. A horizontal watermill, in which water drives a wheel lying flat on a horizontal axis, was a relatively simple and widespread technology in early medieval Ireland, and the presence of a milled grain in the area would have made a reliable access route considerably more valuable.