The road is part of a far larger and older pattern: a complex of curvilinear earthworks covering roughly fifteen hectares on the northern and eastern edge of a plateau, where the ground is punctuated by rock outcrop. What makes the arrangement quietly strange is the layering. The medieval church and its rectangular graveyards sit imposed on top of earthworks that almost certainly predate them by centuries, the later, Christian landscape pressed down onto the earlier one like a seal onto wax.

The earthworks themselves are thought to be early medieval in origin, placing their construction somewhere in the broad span between the fifth and twelfth centuries. The road, by contrast, appears to be later, probably cut to provide a formal approach to the ecclesiastical enclosure from the north. It runs for around ninety metres before reaching the west doorway of the church, which was the liturgically significant entrance in many Irish medieval buildings, associated with processions and the reception of the laity. South of the old graveyard, a further stretch of about fifty metres continues the line. Whether the two sections were always conceived as a single route, or whether the graveyard simply grew to interrupt a path that was already there, is not resolved. A study of the area from the air, cited by Norman and St Joseph in 1969, remains one of the clearest ways to read the full extent of the site, since from ground level the scale and geometry of the curvilinear earthworks are difficult to take in.