Forty-four toghers, the Irish term for a road or causeway laid across boggy ground, were identified in Cooleeny townland during field survey work published in 1999. A togher is essentially a timber platform engineered to carry people, animals, or goods across terrain that would otherwise swallow them whole, and the examples at Cooleeny represent one of the more concentrated clusters yet recorded in the county.

The construction methods varied considerably across the site. Most toghers combined brushwood, the slender, flexible branches trimmed from trees and shrubs, with heavier roundwood timbers, though six relied on roundwood alone and eight on brushwood alone. One unusually hybrid example incorporated gravel alongside the brushwood. Wood species identified across seventeen of the toghers include alder, ash, birch, blackthorn, hazel, mountain ash, and willow, a selection that reflects both what was locally available and what was practically useful in wet conditions, since alder in particular holds up well when kept permanently damp. Two of the toghers have been radiocarbon dated, both falling within the Iron Age: one to between 388 and 207 BC, another to between 372 and 192 BC. The people laying these paths across the bog were doing so during a period when Ireland's metalworking traditions were well established and its social landscape was increasingly organised, yet the toghers themselves speak to something far more immediate, the daily problem of crossing ground that shifts and floods and refuses to carry weight without help.