But at Coolcraheen, that curving roadway of roughly 80 metres may be something considerably older than it appears, its outer edge formed by an earthen bank with stone inclusions that rises up to two metres and spreads up to four metres wide. The bank is largely smothered in overgrowth, with only intermittent traces of a more recent stone wall visible along its inner face, and the passage itself, about five metres across, remains in occasional agricultural use. What looks like a working farm lane may, in fact, follow the arc of a much earlier enclosure.

The site sits on the southern slopes of an east-west ridge, and its relationship to a nearby souterrain is the detail that sharpens the picture. A souterrain is an underground stone-lined passage or chamber, typically associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, used for storage, refuge, or both. The curving bank or banks that define the roadway may well represent the surviving earthworks of a rath, a type of circular ringfort constructed from earthen banks that served as an enclosed farmstead during the early medieval period, broadly the fifth to twelfth centuries. In other words, a working road may have been cut through or laid along the remnants of a ringfort that was itself associated with the underground structure beside it. The inner bank survives in low form and is now topped with an electric fence, a detail that rather neatly captures the long habit of Irish farmers putting old ground to new use.