Such roads through bog are not uncommon in the Irish archaeological record; the wet, airless conditions of peatland can preserve timber and stone for centuries, occasionally millennia, holding in place the evidence of routes and routines that have otherwise vanished from the landscape entirely. What makes the Derrynafeana trackway unusual is not what it preserved, but what it lost.

The paved way was recorded and described by O'Sullivan and Sheehan in 1996. When the area was revisited in 2006, no visible remains of the monument could be found. Recent turf-cutting was evident in the area, which offers a likely explanation. Turf-cutting, the harvesting of peat for fuel, strips away the very material that bogs use to conceal and protect what lies within them. Once the peat is gone, so too is whatever it was keeping intact. A road that had perhaps survived for centuries beneath the surface was, by the time anyone looked again, simply no longer there.