Finding a record of it attached to Annaghcorrib, a townland on the eastern fringe of Lough Corrib in County Galway, introduces a quiet geographical puzzle. This is not the main line of the canal as most people understand it, but rather a fragment of the more ambitious and troubled western extension that sought to push navigation deep into Connacht.

The Grand Canal Company had grand ambitions beyond its core Dublin-to-Shannon route. In the nineteenth century, plans and partial works extended the idea of inland navigation into County Galway, with the intention of linking Loughrea and other western towns into a broader commercial waterway network. The Lough Corrib area sits within that broader story of attempted connectivity, where engineers looked at the natural water systems of the west and tried to press them into service for trade and transport. Many of these western extensions were only partially realised, fell into disuse relatively quickly, or were overtaken by the arrival of the railways, which made the economics of canal freight difficult to defend. A canal feature recorded at Annaghcorrib places this townland somewhere within that unfinished and largely forgotten chapter of Irish infrastructure history, where ambition met difficult terrain, limited funds, and changing technology.