The small road running east-south-east from a complex junction at Ballinlug East and Killan stretches roughly 2.4 kilometres before stopping short, but its original course continued further east, eventually connecting to the entry road of Killoughrum House. From there, travellers could have proceeded along the avenue to the house itself, or turned south towards Monglass. The road as it exists today is, in effect, a fragment, severed from its destination and left to terminate in open countryside.

What makes the original alignment visible at all is the phenomenon of cropmarks, the faint differential growth patterns that appear in fields during dry weather, when buried or disturbed ground beneath the surface affects how crops or grass take up moisture. In drought conditions, the lost section of this road, roughly 2 kilometres in length, becomes legible on satellite imagery. It was first reported by Simon Dowling, who identified it on Google Earth imagery dated 14 July 2018, and a fainter trace had already been visible on Digital Globe imagery from around 2013. The road runs on an east-facing slope, a detail that may affect when and how clearly the cropmark appears depending on light and season. Folk memory in the wider area does retain recollections of old roads, preserved in the Irish Folklore Commission collections, though this particular route does not appear among them, which adds a small note of anonymity to its story.

For anyone exploring the area, the road itself is an ordinary country lane until you know what to look for. The more revealing view is from above, during dry summers when the underlying course asserts itself across the fields east of Mangan, pointing quietly towards a house and a connection that the current map no longer shows.