Roads, particularly rural ones, have a long habit of bending around obstacles that no longer exist above ground, and it is exactly this kind of subtle deflection in the landscape that archaeologists have learned to treat as a potential clue.

The theory here draws on the work of Leo Swan, whose 1988 study examined the traces of Early Christian ecclesiastical enclosures across Ireland. Such enclosures were the defining feature of early medieval Irish monasticism and religious settlement, typically consisting of a roughly circular or oval boundary, often a bank or ditch, that demarcated sacred ground from the surrounding land. Over centuries, the physical boundary itself can vanish entirely, ploughed away or simply absorbed into the soil, but the enclosure's circular shape tends to leave a ghostly impression on the landscape around it. Field boundaries follow it, property lines echo it, and roads curve to accommodate a long-forgotten wall or bank. In Edmondstown, Swan identified the road's curve as possibly reflecting just such a boundary, associated with the graveyard that still stands nearby, which itself may occupy the original ecclesiastical site.