A field survey of Cooleeny townland identified 44 toghers, the Irish word for a timber trackway laid across boggy or waterlogged ground, making this one of the more concentrated clusters of such features recorded in the country. These were not grand engineering works but practical, local solutions: bundles of brushwood, lengths of roundwood, and in one case even gravel, laid down to allow people and perhaps animals to cross terrain that would otherwise have been impassable.

The construction methods varied considerably across the 44 examples. Most combined brushwood, the smaller flexible branches and twigs, with roundwood, which refers to whole or roughly trimmed poles. Six toghers used roundwood alone, eight used only brushwood, and one incorporated gravel alongside the brushwood. Wood species were identified in seventeen of the toghers, and the range is telling: alder, ash, birch, blackthorn, hazel, mountain ash, and willow, reflecting whatever timber was locally available rather than any single preferred material. Two of the toghers have been directly dated, both falling within the Iron Age. One returned dates of 388 to 207 BC and the other 372 to 192 BC, placing their construction somewhere in the middle centuries of the first millennium before the common era, when Iron Age communities were moving through and working around this bogland with enough regularity to warrant the effort of building roads through it.