The banks themselves are modest things, rising only between 0.2 and 0.5 metres above the surrounding pasture, sod-covered for the most part with a few stones breaking the surface here and there. The grassed-over strip between them is what makes the feature legible: this was once a road surface, and the two banks its defining edges.

Local tradition holds that these earthworks are the surviving fragment of a formal avenue that once approached Island House, a country house in the area. At its south-western end, the avenue is said to have joined a public road connecting to the town of Ballyhaunis. The feature does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of either 1838 or 1916, which raises quiet questions about when it fell out of use and why it was never captured by the surveyors who mapped so much of rural Ireland in exhaustive detail. It came to archaeological attention through an aerial photograph rather than any ground-level record, the kind of discovery that reminds you how much landscape history only becomes visible from above, when low light catches earthworks that are otherwise invisible to someone walking past them.