A field survey of Cooleeny townland identified 44 toghers, the Irish term for a wooden road or causeway laid across boggy ground, preserved in the waterlogged peat that has kept them intact for more than two millennia. That so many should survive in a single townland gives some sense of how busy, or at least how persistently wet, this landscape once was.

The toghers vary considerably in their construction. Most were built from a combination of brushwood and roundwood laid directly onto the bog surface, though six relied on roundwood alone, eight on brushwood alone, and one unusually incorporated gravel alongside the brushwood. Wood species were identified in seventeen of the trackways, and the range is striking: alder, ash, birch, blackthorn, hazel, mountain ash, and willow all appear, suggesting that builders were making practical use of whatever grew nearby rather than selecting a single preferred timber. Two of the toghers have been dated through radiocarbon analysis, both falling within the Iron Age. One returned a date range of 388 to 207 BC, the other of 372 to 192 BC, placing their construction somewhere in the centuries before the Roman world had any meaningful contact with Ireland. People were crossing this bog regularly during that period, and doing so with enough engineering effort to fell, gather, and lay substantial quantities of wood across the ground.