They are toghers, a type of wooden trackway laid across boggy or waterlogged ground to allow people and animals to pass where the earth would otherwise swallow them. The technique is one of the oldest forms of road-building in Ireland, and the bogs have preserved examples going back thousands of years, holding timber in conditions that would reduce it to nothing on dry land.

The three toghers at Kilmakill were found in close proximity to one another, spread across ground that offers wide, unobstructed views in every direction, as flat bog tends to do. Two of the trackways were built entirely from brushwood, thin and flexible material laid in compact bundles; one measured roughly 37 centimetres wide and 6 centimetres deep, the other nearly 90 centimetres wide at the same shallow depth. The third was broader and slightly more substantial, nearly a metre wide and 12 centimetres deep, and combined roundwood with brushwood in its construction. Roundwood refers to small-diameter timber used more or less as it was felled, without significant shaping or splitting. All three had been partially destroyed by the time they were recorded by the Irish Archaeological Wetland Unit at University College Dublin, whose fieldwork in Irish boglands has brought many such structures to light. The findings were later published in the Archaeological Inventory of County Tipperary, compiled by Jean Farrelly and Caimin O'Brien in 2002.

What the toghers connected, and when they were laid, the available record does not say. But their clustering suggests this particular stretch of bog was a place people needed to cross repeatedly, and that the effort of laying and perhaps relaying those wooden paths was considered worthwhile.