The local story holds that King James II took this route southwards after his defeat in July 1690, travelling from Dublin towards Duncannon on the Wexford coast, where he would eventually sail into exile in France. The road ran from the old chapel in Kilpatrick, along the western side of the townland of Ballyrichard, continuing through Templerainy and on to Coolboy. That the Ordnance Survey cartographers thought it worth labelling, in two separate places, as "King James' Road" suggests the tradition was well established and locally vivid by the time the six-inch mapping was carried out in the 1830s.

The road's interest does not rest entirely on its royal association. As Liam Price noted in 1967, the trace of the old road remained visible along the townland boundary between Ballyrichard and Johnstown, and several further townland boundaries intersect along its course, a pattern that often signals genuine antiquity rather than a post-medieval invention. Townland boundaries in Ireland frequently preserve the lines of older roads, field systems, and land divisions, sometimes reaching back to medieval or even earlier periods. The route appears to pass directly through what the same 1838 map marks as "Oldtown Field", a name that points to a possible deserted medieval settlement in Ballyrichard. Whether the road itself is medieval in origin, and whether the James II tradition was grafted onto a much older routeway, remains an open question, but the convergence of boundary evidence and place-name memory gives the whole corridor an unusual layered quality.

The visible trace along the Ballyrichard and Johnstown townland boundary is the most tangible point of access to the road's archaeology. The 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map remains a useful guide for tracing the approximate line, and the area around "Oldtown Field" in Ballyrichard rewards careful attention on the ground, where earthworks associated with a deserted medieval settlement may still be discernible to an observant eye.