These are toghers, a word from the Irish tóchar, referring to causeways or trackways built across boggy ground, and the concentration of them in Cooleeny townland is remarkable. Bogs are hostile to human movement but essential as sources of fuel, food, and raw materials, and so communities across prehistoric Ireland invested considerable effort in making them passable. What survives here is a rare, detailed picture of that effort.

A field survey carried out in 1999 documented the full range of these structures and found considerable variety in how they were built. Most combined brushwood, the smaller branches and stems of woody plants, with roundwood, meaning whole or split sections of young timber, laid together to form a stable surface. Six examples used roundwood alone, eight relied entirely on brushwood, and one unusually incorporated gravel alongside the brushwood, suggesting a degree of experimentation or adaptation to local conditions. Two of the toghers were dated using radiocarbon analysis and returned Iron Age dates of 388 to 207 BC and 372 to 192 BC respectively, placing their construction somewhere in the middle centuries of the first millennium before Christ. Wood species were identified in seventeen of the toghers, and the list is varied: alder, ash, birch, blackthorn, hazel, mountain ash, and willow. The selection reflects not a single timber source but opportunistic use of whatever the surrounding landscape provided, with a preference for species that grow quickly and coppice well.