Two parallel gullies, set roughly five metres apart and oriented northeast to southwest, were found immediately outside the south range of the abbey and alongside the west wall of the cloister. On their own, two ditches in the ground might mean almost anything, but an 1840 Ordnance Survey six-inch map showed a trackway along precisely this line, confirming that what the excavators had found was its physical remnant.

Radiocarbon dating placed the eastern of the two gullies within the periods AD 1220 to 1310 and AD 1360 to 1380. Four large post-holes, continuing along the same alignment, added further weight to the picture; a pig bone recovered from one of them returned a date of AD 1160 to 1290. Taken together, the evidence points firmly to a track in regular use during the thirteenth or fourteenth century, when Clareabbey, an Augustinian house, would have been an active and frequented institution. The trackway was, in other words, the ordinary working approach to the abbey, worn into the ground by centuries of foot traffic and perhaps guided by timber posts, before it was abandoned, silted over, and eventually forgotten beneath the fields on the edge of Ennis.