The feature is classified in the archaeological record as a road or trackway, yet its origins are hydraulic. Sunk into the flat ground somewhere between 100 and 200 metres from the riverbank, it reads today as a shallow, reed-fringed depression, the kind of thing easily dismissed as a drainage ditch or a quirk of the terrain.

An undated map by the Longfield surveying family, held in the National Library of Ireland, labels it an "old deserted canal" and shows it accompanied by a laneway that may have served as a towpath, though no physical trace of that path has been identified on the ground. In its working life the canal ran for approximately two kilometres, from just below Battle Bridge southward to a point just above Inishnagon island on the Co. Leitrim side of the border. It was an early attempt to ease navigation along this stretch of the upper Shannon, a river whose seasonal flooding and shifting channels made commercial movement difficult. By the 1850s the canal had been rendered redundant by the construction of the Lough Allen canal on the Leitrim side, a more substantial piece of engineering that absorbed its purpose if not its course. Most of the original cut has since been filled in, but roughly 700 metres of the northern end survives as a readable hollow, between eight and eleven metres wide and no more than about a metre deep at its most pronounced, the whole of it softened now under grass and reeds.