This is a togher, a term used in Irish archaeology for a wooden trackway laid across wet or marshy ground to allow passage where solid footing would otherwise be impossible. The Cloonbreany example belongs to a class defined by its construction technique: longitudinal hurdle panels, essentially woven sections of hazel branches arranged lengthways, supplemented by loosely placed hazel stems and held in position with occasional wooden pegs.

The togher was first noted in 1986 and subsequently radiocarbon dated to somewhere between 1249 and 1016 BC, placing its construction firmly in the later Bronze Age. The surviving stretch measures at least 14.9 metres in length and roughly 3 metres in width, running on a north-north-east to south-south-west axis. Work on the site is associated with research by Barry Raftery, whose extensive study of Irish bog roads, published in 1990 and expanded in 1996 as part of the broader Corlea project, brought the wetland trackways of the Irish midlands to wider scholarly attention. The Corlea bog, not far from Cloonbreany, is perhaps the most famous of the region's ancient road sites, and the Cloonbreany togher belongs to the same dense network of prehistoric routes that crisscrossed this waterlogged landscape during the Bronze Age.