The road in question runs through low-lying bogland northwest of the River Shannon, directly opposite the ancient monastic site at Clonmacnoise, and what makes it peculiar is the relationship between the old and the new: the modern road through Nure village, running roughly north-northwest to south-southeast for about three kilometres, appears to follow the exact line of this buried trackway, as though successive generations simply kept walking, and then driving, along a route someone else had already established.

The buried road came to light in 1983, when it was exposed at two separate points along its length. What emerged was a layer of compacted gravel roughly two and a half to three metres wide and about thirty centimetres thick, sitting between sixty centimetres and a metre down in the peat. The section examined runs for approximately one kilometre. Roads of this kind, sometimes called toghers or trackways when built from timber, were a common solution to the problem of moving people and goods across Ireland's extensive boglands, where the ground would otherwise be impassable. This one is unusual in being constructed from gravel rather than laid timber, and its position opposite Clonmacnoise, one of early medieval Ireland's most significant ecclesiastical centres, raises obvious questions about who was using it and when. A portion of the road survives within an area of uncut peat and has been afforded protection under Section 8 of the National Monuments Act of 1954, the legislative mechanism by which the state can preserve monuments deemed to be at risk.

The road is not visible at the surface, and the bog itself is not a place for casual wandering. The most tangible experience of it is, in a sense, driving the modern road through Nure, which may have been laid directly on top of the gravel that predecessors packed down centuries or millennia ago. The exact age of the trackway has not been established from the available information, which only adds to its quiet strangeness: a route with no confirmed date, buried under fields and tarmac, running toward one of Ireland's most visited early Christian sites.