A field survey of Cooleeny townland identified 44 toghers, the plural of togher, an Irish term for a wooden trackway laid across boggy or waterlogged ground. These were not roads in any grand sense, but practical, considered structures built to allow people to cross terrain that would otherwise have been impassable, and what survives of them has been preserved for centuries by the very wetness they were designed to overcome.

The variety of construction methods across the 44 examples is itself telling. Most were built using a combination of brushwood, the smaller, more flexible material, and roundwood, the heavier cut timber that provided structural support. Six were made from roundwood alone, eight relied entirely on brushwood, and one unusually incorporated gravel alongside brushwood, suggesting that builders adapted their approach to local conditions and available materials. Wood species identified in seventeen of the toghers include alder, ash, birch, blackthorn, hazel, mountain ash, and willow, a selection that reflects careful, local sourcing rather than any single preferred timber. Two of the toghers have been directly dated by radiocarbon analysis, both falling within the Iron Age: one to 388 to 207 BC and another to 372 to 192 BC. That places their construction in a period when this part of Tipperary was evidently busy enough with movement, whether of people, animals, or goods, to justify the considerable labour of laying wooden roads through the bog.