In a level pasture field near Clonard New in County Kildare, a pair of low grassed-over earthen banks runs for roughly 45 metres across the ground, pointing north-east to south-west. They are not dramatic, and that is rather the point. The banks, between three and four and a half metres wide at their base and rising only about half a metre to just over a metre in height, are the surviving edges of a formal approach trackway, the kind of sunken or raised lane that would once have guided a carriage or a rider in a deliberate, legible line from road to residence.

The trackway, which is two to three metres wide between the banks, appears to date from the eighteenth or nineteenth century, a period when improving landlords across Ireland were reshaping their estates with avenues, walled gardens, and entrance lodges. This one leads, apparently, towards a now derelict lodge that sits at the fork of the main road nearby. The lodge is gone to ruin, and the lane that served it has long since lost its surface and its purpose, leaving only these parallel ridges in the grass to suggest that the approach once mattered, that someone thought it worth building a formal entrance to whatever stood here.