A field survey of Cooleeny townland identified 44 toghers, including possible examples, preserved within the bog. A togher is a trackway laid across wet or boggy ground, typically constructed from timber, allowing people and animals to move through terrain that would otherwise have been impassable. That so many should cluster within a single townland suggests this was no casual crossing but a landscape that people were navigating repeatedly, purposefully, across a very long stretch of time.

The construction methods varied considerably from one togher to the next. Most combined brushwood, the finer branching material, with roundwood, which refers to whole or split timber poles used more or less as felled. Six relied on roundwood alone, eight on brushwood alone, and one unusual example incorporated gravel alongside the brushwood. Radiocarbon dating on two of the toghers placed them firmly in the Iron Age, with date ranges of 388 to 207 BC and 372 to 192 BC respectively. Where wood species could be identified across seventeen of the trackways, the variety was striking: alder, ash, birch, blackthorn, hazel, mountain ash, and willow all appear, suggesting that builders drew on whatever was locally available and suited to the task rather than following a single template. Alder and willow in particular are well suited to wet conditions, and their use in bog trackways is a pattern recognised at sites elsewhere in Ireland. The survey findings were published by Gowen in 1999 and remain a significant body of evidence for organised movement through the Irish midland boglands during the pre-Christian period.