On the south-western slopes of a hill in Gleninsheen, County Clare, there is a narrow boreen, a small rural lane, that was formally listed as a historic road or trackway in 1996. The listing came about on the basis of information submitted two years earlier, and on paper it sat alongside genuine prehistoric and early medieval features in the same register. The catch is that when someone actually went to look at it in 1999, the road turned out to be of modern construction, built from low earthen banks with a loose stone wall laid on top.

The episode is a small, quiet illustration of how archaeological inventories are compiled and sometimes corrected. The Record of Monuments and Places, in which this boreen appeared, was assembled under considerable time pressure during the 1990s, drawing on local knowledge, correspondence, and earlier surveys rather than direct inspection of every site. A communication from T. Coffey provided the original information, and the feature was duly recorded. It was only on physical examination that its modern character became clear. The boreen itself is unremarkable in form, the kind of field access lane found throughout the west of Ireland, edged with the rough stonework that generations of farmers used to define boundaries and clear ground simultaneously. What makes it worth noting is less the road than the bureaucratic paper trail it left behind, a reminder that the archive of the past is always being revised.