Twenty-nine of these structures, known as toghers, were identified in Killoran townland during field survey work published in 1999. A togher is a timber trackway laid across boggy or waterlogged ground to allow passage, and the examples at Killoran represent a quiet concentration of early medieval engineering that has survived precisely because the wet, oxygen-poor conditions of the bog slow decay almost to a standstill.

The survey found considerable variation in how the toghers were built. Fifteen relied entirely on brushwood, the simplest and most readily available material, while the remainder combined brushwood with roundwood for added stability. Three of the toghers showed evidence of pegs or stakes, suggesting a more deliberate effort to keep the surface in place underfoot. Wood identification carried out on thirteen of the toghers revealed that the builders drew on whatever the local landscape offered: alder, ash, birch, elm, hazel, holly, and mountain ash all appear in the record, with ash and hazel the most commonly used. Radiocarbon dating of one togher placed its construction somewhere between AD 1024 and 1162, a period when the bogs of the Irish midlands were being crossed and worked with some regularity, and when the careful selection and laying of timber was a practical skill passed through communities rather than committed to any written record. The fact that so many toghers cluster within a single townland suggests Killoran was a place people needed to move through, not simply around.