A field survey identified 44 toghers in Cooleeny townland alone, toghers being the Irish term for trackways built across boggy or waterlogged ground, typically from timber laid directly onto the soft surface. That so many should cluster within a single townland speaks to how heavily this landscape was being crossed and managed in antiquity, long before the bog swallowed the evidence and preserved it.

The construction methods vary considerably across the 44 examples. Most were built using a combination of brushwood, the thin woody stems and branches of shrubs, and roundwood, meaning small whole trunks or poles. Six relied on roundwood alone, eight on brushwood alone, and one unusually incorporated gravel alongside brushwood. Two of the toghers were dated using radiocarbon analysis, both returning Iron Age results: one to 388 to 207 BC and another to 372 to 192 BC, placing their construction somewhere in the later centuries before the common era. The wood species identified across seventeen of the toghers reflect a practical use of whatever grew locally, including alder, ash, birch, blackthorn, hazel, mountain ash, and willow. Alder and willow in particular thrive in wet ground and would have been readily available at the bog's edge, suggesting the builders were working with an intimate knowledge of their immediate environment rather than hauling materials from a distance.