The trouble is that when archaeologists actually dug into it, almost nothing was there to find.

The name is thought to refer not to Oliver Cromwell himself but to General Henry Ireton, Cromwell's son-in-law, whose forces were operating in the area in 1651 during the Parliamentarian campaign to suppress Irish resistance following the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. In 1998, ahead of a gas pipeline running from Limerick to Ballina, County Tipperary, via Castleconnell, archaeologist Kenneth Hanley excavated two test trenches along the route under licence No. 98E0429. The trenches, each roughly a metre wide and dug to a depth of one metre, produced no finds of any kind. At about 0.47 metres below the modern road surface, excavators encountered iron panning over a compacted sandy clay, which may represent an early dirt track. If so, there was no evidence that it had ever been deliberately engineered or surfaced; it appears to have been used simply as a natural routeway. The earliest actual road construction found was a crude layer of cobbling set into fine sand, almost certainly laid in the nineteenth or early twentieth century. Below that, the underlying deposits were essentially sterile. As Hanley concluded in his published summary, if this was the route taken by Ireton's forces, their presence has been marked by name only.

The road today passes through ordinary rural County Limerick countryside between Lisnagry and Castleconnell, with nothing visible on the surface to suggest anything out of the ordinary. There is no monument, no signage relating to the name, and no physical trace of any military past. What makes it worth knowing about is precisely that absence: a name that has persisted on maps for well over a century, pointing back to a violent and consequential period of Irish history, with almost no physical evidence beneath the tarmac to confirm or deny it.