Somewhere between a modern farm lane and a medieval pilgrimage route, a sequence of trackways, minor roads, and field paths crossing south County Waterford preserves the fragmented outline of one of Ireland's older long-distance roads. Much of it is invisible on the ground, absorbed into the working landscape of townlands, but enough survives, in the form of short surviving lanes, parallel farm tracks, and sections of public road, to allow its general course to be followed from the River Blackwater southward towards Ardmore on the coast.

The road is known as the Rian Bó Phádraig, a name that translates roughly as the track of Patrick's cow, and it is described in detail by the Reverend Patrick Power in a paper published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland in 1905. Power traced it running between Lismore and Ardmore, crossing the River Blackwater at a ford near Affane before picking its way south through Knocknaskagh, Keereen, Ballycullane, and Graigue to Goish Bridge. South of the bridge, farm lanes carry the route parallel to the Youghal to Clonmel road, running about 200 metres to the east of it, before the road turns southeast towards the Lickey River. It is from the Lickey southward that the route becomes explicitly associated with St Declan, the early Christian bishop of the Decies whose cult is centred on Ardmore, and who is considered by some traditions to predate St Patrick's mission in Ireland. A moated site, which is the remains of a medieval fortified enclosure, lies close to the route near Keereen Upper, a reminder that the road was not only an early ecclesiastical path but a corridor of settlement and movement across several centuries. South of the Lickey, forest tracks and farm paths continue the line towards the N25 Dungarvan to Cork road, near Grange church, after which the route becomes untraceable for roughly 1.7 kilometres before reappearing in the townland of Ballynamertinagh.

What makes the road quietly arresting is the way it survives at all, not as a preserved monument but as a series of functional, unremarkable lanes that happen to follow a very old alignment. A short section of about 100 metres near the River Finisk still exists as a lane leading to the water's edge, which is perhaps the most tangible surviving fragment of the earlier road in this part of its course.