It is not a road in any grand sense, being just thirty centimetres wide, barely enough for a single person to place their feet with care, but its survival is extraordinary. Thin oak planks, laid end to end in a north-west to south-east line, were set on short transverse timbers to keep them from sinking into the soft ground, and in places small stakes were driven through drilled holes in the planks to hold them steady. Someone thought carefully about this. Someone measured, bored, and fitted.

A togher is a timber trackway built across boggy or waterlogged terrain, a form of infrastructure that appears throughout early medieval Ireland wherever movement through the landscape demanded it. This particular example was noted in 1987 and extends at least 240 metres, though the full original length is unknown. Tree-ring dating, known as dendrochronology, placed its construction to around AD 587, give or take nine years, making it a product of the early Christian period in Ireland, a time when the surrounding midlands were threaded with small kingdoms and monastic settlements. The reference designation Q6696 ties it to a broader programme of bog road research, and it appears in work by the archaeologist Barry Raftery, who documented the Corlea complex of toghers in this region extensively during the 1990s.

The Cloonbreany togher is a class 2 example, a classification based on construction method rather than size or importance, distinguishing it from the heavier plank roads of the type preserved at the nearby Corlea Trackway Visitor Centre. That centre, a short distance away, displays a different but related road dated to 148 BC and offers context for understanding why the midland bogs were crossable at all in this period, and at what cost in timber and labour.