A disused road running north of a ruined monastery and then bending southwest towards the River Liffey might seem like an unremarkable feature of the Kildare landscape. But that quiet curve in the ground almost certainly traces the line of a medieval routeway leading to a crossing point that was considered significant enough to name a whole barony after. Connell Ford, as it appears on the 1837 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, sits roughly 590 metres southwest of the old monastery at Greatconnell, and the ford itself gave the surrounding territory its identity long before cartographers arrived to write it down.

The Augustinian priory nearby was founded in 1202 by Meyler Fitzhenry, a powerful Anglo-Norman magnate, and its placement so close to an established river crossing was almost certainly deliberate. Religious houses of this period frequently positioned themselves along functioning routeways, where traffic, trade, and travellers could sustain a community and spread influence. The crossing's importance is confirmed by the Down Survey, a large-scale mapping project carried out in the mid-seventeenth century following the Cromwellian land confiscations. The terrier, which is the written descriptive document accompanying the Down Survey map for the barony of Great Connell, records the presence of 'Connell Foords' over the Liffey, using the plural form, which suggests the crossing may have involved more than one channel or negotiable line through the river at that point. By the time of the nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey, the ford had been recorded and fixed in print, though the routeway serving it had already fallen into disuse.