A togher is a timber trackway laid across wet or boggy ground, often constructed from split oak planks or brushwood bundled together, allowing people and animals to cross terrain that would otherwise have been impassable. They survive because the airless, acidic conditions of a bog act as a preservative, holding organic material in a kind of suspended state for centuries or even millennia. The existence of one at Coolreagh places this otherwise unremarkable patch of Clare bogland in a long tradition of early engineering that stretches back in some cases to the Bronze Age.