A field survey at Cooleeny townland identified 44 toghers, a togher being a timber road laid across boggy ground to allow passage where the terrain would otherwise be impassable. The sheer number of them in a single townland suggests this was not an occasional crossing point but a place that people returned to, planned around, and invested real labour in across generations.

The construction methods varied considerably. Most toghers combined brushwood, the smaller branching material, with roundwood, the trimmed trunks and poles that gave the road its structural backbone. Six relied on roundwood alone, eight on brushwood alone, and one incorporated gravel alongside brushwood, an unusual detail that hints at a builder responding to specific local conditions. Radiocarbon dates obtained from two of the trackways placed them firmly in the Iron Age, one returning a range of 388 to 207 BC and another of 372 to 192 BC, meaning people were threading routes across this bog more than two thousand years ago. Wood species identified across seventeen of the toghers included alder, ash, birch, blackthorn, hazel, mountain ash, and willow, a list that reads almost like a survey of whatever the surrounding landscape could offer. The variety suggests opportunistic timber selection rather than a single preferred material, with builders likely cutting from nearby scrub and woodland as each project demanded.