But at Rathealy in County Kilkenny, a feature of this kind, known as a hollow-way, preserves the faint outline of a route that once connected the buildings of a now-vanished community. The hollow-way runs roughly east to west for about 27 metres, cut to a depth of between 0.6 and 1.2 metres and about 2.5 metres wide. These dimensions are modest, but they are enough to suggest a path worn down by repeated use rather than deliberately constructed, the landscape slowly yielding to the pressure of daily movement.

The hollow-way sits at the point where the slope of a valley side levels out into fairly flat valley floor, in rolling grassland that still carries moderate views along and across the valley. It runs immediately north of a wide earthen bank on the north side of a building that forms part of a deserted medieval settlement. Its apparent direction of travel is telling: the hollow-way seems to have been heading towards the entrance of a ringwork, a type of defensive enclosure typically defined by a raised earthen bank and ditch, located about 70 metres to the east-south-east. The connecting section of the path, however, is no longer visible at the surface. The most likely explanation is that a large enclosure was constructed across that ground at some later point, disturbing or burying what lay beneath. That same enclosure partially overlies a graveyard associated with a medieval church to the south, which means the enclosure post-dates both the church and its burial ground, and probably the hollow-way too. What survives at Rathealy, then, is a fragment of a much older pattern of movement, cut short by later building and only partially legible now in the turf.