Duckboards are long wooden boards, often joined into a walkway, laid over mud so people can walk without sinking. You meet them on building sites, in wet gardens, on festival fields after rain, and in old war stories: soldiers in the First World War stood on duckboards in the trenches so they were not standing in water all day. It is a practical, slightly old-fashioned word; a builder might just say boards or a walkway. They are nearly always talked about in the plural: one piece is a board, the path is duckboards.