The curious thing about Bohernatawnagh is not what it shows, but what it no longer is. By the time anyone went looking for it on the ground, the road had effectively ceased to exist.

The OS six-inch maps, surveyed in the 1830s, captured the Irish landscape at a moment when older patterns of movement were still legible, even if only just. This particular roadway ran parallel to the townland boundary separating Collinstown and Ballynagall from Johnstown, suggesting it may have served as a boundary route or a passage between communities rather than a through road to anywhere of obvious importance. When the site was examined in 1981, the investigator found no trace of a road or track on the ground at all. What remained was a line of field fences, themselves following the townland boundary, and the suspicion that the two things, the fences and the former track, were occupying roughly the same space. The road had not so much vanished as been absorbed, its course quietly fossilised into the pattern of field division that replaced it.

The 1981 note left open the possibility that something might still survive beneath the vegetation, and suggested that an autumn visit, when growth dies back, could reveal low earthwork traces of the original surface or verges. Whether any such visit was ever made is not recorded. The site sits in that particular category of Irish historical feature that exists most fully as a name on an old map, a reminder that roads, like the journeys taken along them, can disappear without leaving much behind.