In the townland of Ballyblake in County Limerick, a route known as Boherleagaun has been in continuous use long enough to be fossilised into the modern landscape, yet the original surface beneath today's tarmac and gravel has vanished entirely. You are, in a very literal sense, travelling an old road without being able to see it.

The name Boherleagaun, recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1928, preserves the memory of the trackway even where the physical evidence does not. The present road follows the same alignment, but it is held in place now by a patchwork of earthen banks, hedgerow field boundaries, modern walls associated with housing, and post-and-wire fencing, the accumulated layering of centuries of boundary-making over what was once an earlier route. What makes the site quietly more interesting is the cluster of standing stones nearby. Two stones, recorded in the Sites and Monuments Record as LI023-032 and LI023-033, lie close to the west of the road, while a third, LI023-034, sits a little further to the west again. Standing stones of this kind are generally prehistoric in origin, raised individually or in loose groupings across the Irish countryside, and their proximity to an established route may be coincidental, or may reflect something older about how this corridor through the land was used and marked.

There is nothing to see of the original trackway at ground level, and a visitor should approach Ballyblake with that expectation firmly in place. The interest here is archaeological rather than visual. The standing stones are the most tangible feature worth seeking out, and their position relative to the road gives some sense of how the landscape was arranged around this corridor. The notes compiled by Denis Power for the record, uploaded in November 2013, make clear that the route survives only as an alignment, not as a surface, which makes it the sort of place that rewards a little background reading before arrival rather than a spontaneous detour.