Laid horizontally across a peat substrate, the wood had been there long enough for the ground above it to have completely closed over, leaving nothing visible at the surface. What made it worth noting was not simply its age, but its context: a possible togher, a type of prehistoric trackway built from timber and brushwood to allow passage across wet, treacherous ground, running at least 41 metres through a landscape that was once far wetter than it appears today.

The timbers came to light in 2016 during archaeological testing carried out ahead of a proposed quarry extension, when a series of parallel test trenches was excavated across the site. Three of those trenches, each 2.3 metres wide and spaced 10 metres apart, cut through the same layer of wood: larger pieces between 0.8 and 1.25 metres long sat alongside smaller fragments and twigs, all lying flat on the peat. No tool marks were recorded on the timbers, and the arrangement lacked the clear structural definition you might expect from a carefully engineered road. Still, the overall width of around 7 metres, and the consistent east to west orientation across the trenches, pointed toward something deliberate. The valley it crosses sits between low glacial drumlins, those rounded ridges left behind by retreating ice sheets, and the timbers may once have spanned the edges of a former lake or marshy hollow at its base. Adding weight to the interpretation, a burnt mound was uncovered just a few metres to the south in another trench. Burnt mounds, known in Irish as fulachtaí fia, are among the most common prehistoric monuments in Ireland and are thought to relate to cooking or industrial activity involving heated stones and water. The possibility that the togher once led directly to this feature suggests the two were connected in use, perhaps serving the same community at roughly the same period.