Somewhere in the level pasture of Cloncurry in County Kildare, a lane that nobody uses any longer has been slowly sinking into the ground for centuries. It is not a ditch or a drain but a hollow-way, a road worn down over generations of foot traffic, cart wheels, and driven livestock until the land on either side stood noticeably higher than the path itself. This particular example is broad enough to suggest it once carried serious traffic: between seven and eight metres wide and dropping roughly one and a half metres below the surrounding field surface. It runs for approximately six hundred metres on a northeast to southwest alignment before splitting at its southwestern end into two shorter branches, one heading northwest and one continuing southwest, each around eighty metres long. That fork is a detail worth pausing over. It implies a junction, a point where travellers once made a choice about where they were going.

The road appears on a map drawn in 1752 by a surveyor named Netterville, produced as part of a record of Michael Aylmer's estate and now held in the National Library of Ireland. That it was mapped at all suggests it was still a recognisable feature of the landscape in the mid-eighteenth century, even if no longer in active use. More intriguing is the suggestion, made by Bradley and colleagues in a 1986 study of Irish medieval towns, that this hollow-way may mark the site of the medieval borough of Cloncurry. Boroughs in medieval Ireland were small chartered settlements, often associated with Anglo-Norman manorial estates, granted the right to hold markets and fairs. Many of them did not survive into the modern era and left little above ground. If the identification is correct, this sunken track may represent one of the main streets or approach roads of a settlement that has otherwise entirely disappeared from the landscape.