Toghers, as they are known in Irish archaeology, are trackways laid across boggy or waterlogged ground, typically built from timber and brushwood to allow people and livestock to cross terrain that would otherwise be impassable. What makes Cooleeny townland remarkable is the sheer concentration of them: a field survey identified 44 in total, making this one of the more densely documented togher sites in the country.

The construction methods varied considerably across the 44 examples. Most combined brushwood, the smaller branchy material cut from shrubs and trees, with roundwood, the straight-cut poles and rods that gave the trackway its structural backbone. Six toghers used roundwood alone, eight relied solely on brushwood, and one unusual example incorporated gravel alongside the brushwood. Seventeen of the toghers preserved enough organic material for wood species to be identified, and the range is striking: alder, ash, birch, blackthorn, hazel, mountain ash, and willow all appear, suggesting the builders were drawing on whatever grew locally and suited the purpose rather than following a single rigid template. Two of the toghers were radiocarbon dated, both returning Iron Age results of 388 to 207 BC and 372 to 192 BC respectively, placing their construction somewhere in the middle centuries of the first millennium BC, during a period when Irish communities were actively managing and moving through bogland landscapes that we now tend to think of as wilderness.