A togher is a bog road, typically a causeway of timber laid across wet ground to allow people, animals, or goods to pass through otherwise impassable terrain. In Cooleeny townland alone, a field survey carried out in 1999 identified no fewer than 44 of them, a concentration that suggests this stretch of bogland was once a well-trafficked and carefully managed crossing point rather than a marginal wilderness.

The engineering involved, while modest in its materials, shows a clear practical intelligence. Most of the toghers were built using a combination of brushwood and roundwood timbers, though some relied on roundwood alone and others on brushwood only. One unusual example incorporated brushwood and gravel together. Wood species identified across seventeen of the toghers include alder, ash, birch, blackthorn, hazel, mountain ash, and willow, a selection that reflects what was locally available rather than any single preferred timber. Two of the toghers have been directly dated and both fall within the Iron Age, one to 388 to 207 BC and another to 372 to 192 BC. These are not approximate guesses but dendrochronological or radiocarbon ranges, placing the construction of at least part of this network in the centuries before the Roman conquest of Britain, when Iron Age communities in Ireland were moving through this landscape with enough regularity to warrant building and presumably maintaining permanent crossing points through the bog.