That a route across the land should earn this designation speaks to how much older roads can tell us: not just about movement and trade, but about the shape of a landscape that has long since changed around them.

Trackways of this kind range in age from prehistoric to early modern, and their forms vary considerably. Some are simple worn paths across bogland, preserved by the very waterlogged conditions that would have made them treacherous to cross. Others are more deliberately engineered, with laid timbers or stone surfaces indicating organised effort and communal intent. In boggy parts of Connacht especially, the survival of such routes beneath the peat is not unusual, since the anaerobic conditions that preserve organic material can keep wooden causeways intact for thousands of years. The Drum trackway has been formally identified and recorded as a monument, which places it within a tradition of landscape features considered significant enough to warrant legal protection, even where the precise details of its date, construction, and extent remain to be fully documented.