A field survey of Cooleeny townland identified 44 toghers, the old Irish term for a road or path laid across boggy ground, built from timber rather than stone and preserved for centuries in the anaerobic conditions of the peat. That so many should cluster within a single townland gives some sense of how busy this wet, difficult ground once was, and how much effort people were willing to invest in crossing it.

The toghers vary in their construction. Most were built using a combination of brushwood and roundwood laid directly onto or into the bog surface, though six relied on roundwood alone, eight used only brushwood, and one unusually incorporated gravel alongside the brushwood. Two of the trackways have been dated by radiocarbon analysis to the Iron Age: one to between 388 and 207 BC, the other to between 372 and 192 BC, placing their construction in a period when Ireland's wetlands were being crossed and exploited with considerable regularity. Wood identification was carried out on material from seventeen of the toghers, and the range of species recorded reflects a practical opportunism rather than any strong preference: alder, ash, birch, blackthorn, hazel, mountain ash, and willow all appear, suggesting that builders were working with whatever timber grew nearby rather than selecting for particular qualities. The variety also hints at a local landscape of mixed woodland and scrub, long since transformed by centuries of farming and drainage.