Known in Irish as Bóthar an Iarla Ruaid, the Road of the Red Earl, it once connected the town of Ballymote in Co. Sligo with Boyle Abbey in Co. Roscommon, skirting around the northern and eastern flanks of the Bricklieve Mountains over a distance of roughly 21 kilometres. What makes it quietly strange is how it persists: not as a monument, not as a ruin, but as a living road that has simply continued to be used, its medieval bones occasionally surfacing from beneath modern repairs.

The road is attributed to Richard de Burgh, the Red Earl of Ulster, who is said to have ordered its construction following the Norman conquest of Connacht in order to link his castle at Ballymote with Boyle Abbey. De Burgh was one of the most powerful magnates in medieval Ireland, and a direct route between a fortified seat and a major ecclesiastical centre would have served both practical and political purposes. The section passing through the townland of Carrowkeel survives for approximately 2.6 kilometres, part as a trackway and part beneath a tarred surface. Where the original road emerges, it is defined by low banks of earth and stone, roughly a metre wide and about 0.4 metres high, and in places on its western side the track is cut into the natural slope of the land, leaving a scarp that reveals something of the original engineering. At around three metres wide, it is a modest but purposeful route. A possible companion road, Bóthar an Corran, appears to have branched off from the main line somewhere around Greenan townland, looping around the southern side of the Bricklieve Mountains to reach Ballinafad, its nearest point lying less than a kilometre to the south-west.

The trackway sections are most legible where the land has not been improved or resurfaced, and the low flanking banks are the clearest indicator that you are looking at something older than the road surface beneath your feet. The surrounding Bricklieve Mountains are themselves well known for the Carrowkeel megalithic cemetery, so the landscape carries layers of use stretching back far beyond even the Red Earl's time. On the older Ordnance Survey maps, from the editions of 1914 and 1941, only fragments of the road are marked, an absence that obscures what was always a continuous route and can make it easy to underestimate just how coherent a piece of medieval infrastructure this once was.