A togher is a bog road, a causeway laid down across waterlogged ground using timber, and Cooleeny townland alone has yielded forty-four of them, or probable examples of them, identified through systematic field survey. That density in a single townland is striking, and it hints at how thoroughly people were moving through and across this landscape long before any road we might recognise today.

The toghers vary considerably in their construction. Most combine brushwood, the thin, flexible stems of woody shrubs, with roundwood, the straight poles cut from managed trees, though six rely on roundwood alone and eight on brushwood alone. One unusual example incorporates gravel alongside the brushwood. Where wood species could be identified, across seventeen of the toghers, the range is broad: alder, ash, birch, blackthorn, hazel, mountain ash, and willow all appear, suggesting that builders were selecting from whatever was locally available rather than following a fixed material preference. Two of the toghers have been dated directly. Both fall within the Iron Age, one to between 388 and 207 BC and the other to between 372 and 192 BC, placing their construction somewhere in the middle centuries of the first millennium before the common era. People were crossing this bog, purposefully and repeatedly, more than two thousand years ago, and they were doing it on roads they built themselves from the wood of the surrounding landscape.