A field survey of Cooleeny townland identified 44 toghers, the Irish term for a bog road or causeway built to allow passage across otherwise impassable wetland. That so many should cluster within a single townland speaks to how intensively this landscape was once crossed and used, probably over centuries, by people who had worked out precisely how to make a path hold firm in waterlogged ground.

The construction methods varied considerably across the 44 examples. Most were built from a combination of brushwood and roundwood laid directly into the bog, though six relied on roundwood alone, eight on brushwood alone, and one unusual example incorporated brushwood and gravel together. Wood species were identified in seventeen of the toghers, and the range is striking: 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 prescription. Two of the toghers were radiocarbon dated, and both returned Iron Age results, one falling between 388 and 207 BC and another between 372 and 192 BC. That places at least some of this network in the later prehistoric period, when communities across Ireland were routinely engineering their way through bogland with considerable skill and practical knowledge of timber.