To a trained eye, however, they are the remnants of a togher, an ancient timber trackway built to carry people and animals across boggy or waterlogged ground. This particular example has been classified as a class 3 togher, a category that typically denotes a relatively simple form of construction, and it was laid out on an east-west orientation, suggesting it once served a deliberate and practical route across the landscape.

Togher construction was a widespread response to the wet, difficult terrain that characterised much of the Irish midlands, where raised bogs and marshland made movement genuinely hazardous for much of the year. Builders would lay timber planks, branches, or brushwood directly onto the soft ground, creating a firm surface above the waterlogged earth. The wood preserved in such anaerobic, oxygen-poor conditions can survive for thousands of years, which is why fragments still appear at the surface in Cloonbreany even after the trackway itself has been largely destroyed. The site falls within a broader pattern of wetland archaeology that has been documented across the Irish midlands, where drainage and agricultural activity have exposed, and in many cases damaged, these fragile buried structures.