Scattered across Cooleeny townland are at least 44 toghers, the Irish term for a timber trackway laid across boggy ground, constructed to allow people and perhaps livestock to move through terrain that would otherwise have been impassable. The sheer number of them in a single townland is striking, and the variety in their construction methods suggests not a single organised project but generations of practical problem-solving carried out over time.

A field survey published by Gowen in 1999 recorded these structures in detail, and the picture that emerges is one of considerable ingenuity worked from locally available materials. Most of the toghers combined brushwood, the fine branchy offcuts of woodland management, with roundwood, the straight poles cut from coppiced or felled trees. Six relied on roundwood alone, eight used only brushwood, and one unusual example incorporated gravel alongside the brushwood. Two of the toghers were radiocarbon dated and both returned Iron Age results, one to 388 to 207 BC and another to 372 to 192 BC, placing at least part of this network firmly in the centuries before the Roman period reached Britain. Wood identification carried out on seventeen of the toghers revealed a broad range of species: alder, ash, birch, blackthorn, hazel, mountain ash, and willow. These are all trees and shrubs typical of Irish wet woodland and scrub, suggesting that the builders were drawing on whatever grew nearby rather than selecting a single preferred timber. Alder in particular is well suited to wet conditions, as it resists decay when kept permanently damp, and its presence in bog trackways across Ireland is no coincidence.