Forty-four toghers, as bog roads are known in Irish archaeology, have been identified within Cooleeny townland alone, making this one of the more concentrated clusters of such structures recorded in the country. A togher is essentially a trackway laid across soft or waterlogged ground using timber and other organic material, allowing people and animals to cross terrain that would otherwise be impassable. What makes the Cooleeny examples particularly striking is how well the bog preserved the evidence of the choices their builders made, down to the species of tree felled and the manner in which the timber was prepared.

A field survey carried out in 1999 and documented by Gowen revealed a range of construction methods across the 44 toghers. Most combined brushwood, the smaller branches and twigs of felled trees, with roundwood, the trimmed trunks or larger branches. Six used roundwood alone, eight relied solely on brushwood, and one incorporated gravel alongside brushwood, a more unusual approach. Where wood species could be identified across seventeen of the toghers, the variety is notable: alder, ash, birch, blackthorn, hazel, mountain ash, and willow all appear, suggesting builders drew on whatever grew locally and suited the task. Two of the toghers were directly dated through scientific analysis, both returning Iron Age results. The calibrated date ranges, 388 to 207 BC for one and 372 to 192 BC for the other, place their construction in a period when the Irish landscape was being actively managed and crossed by communities whose material culture is still being pieced together from sites exactly like this one.