It looks, at first glance, like nothing more than an overgrown field boundary. But this modest feature is thought to represent a surviving fragment of one of Ireland's oldest long-distance routes, the Rian Bó Phádraig, or the Track of Patrick's Cow, a name that folds legend and landscape together in a single phrase.

The Rian Bó Phádraig forms part of what is also called St. Declan's Way, a route traditionally associated with early Christian pilgrimage between the ecclesiastical centres of Ardmore and Lismore in County Waterford and the great rock-top settlement of Cashel in County Tipperary. In this section of south Tipperary, the route runs north to south for roughly five kilometres across gently rolling pasture and arable ground, passing through the townlands of Knockannaveigh, Ballygerald East, and Lalor's Lot. The possible original road surface, where it can still be read in the landscape, is defined on its western side by that low earthen bank with its intermittent thorn trees, and on its eastern side by the modern road that has, in all likelihood, absorbed or replaced much of the original line. The question of just how ancient this route actually is proved difficult to resolve when archaeologists had a rare chance to investigate. During pipeline work carried out in 1998 and 1999 to the south of Cashel, excavations along a section of the so-called Old Road, which supposedly follows the Rian Bó Phádraig, produced no physical evidence for the ancient road at all. The excavator noted, however, that the Old Road sits directly on or cuts through bedrock, raising the possibility that any earlier surface or associated deposits were simply removed when the road was built or subsequently upgraded.

The most legible surviving section of the earlier trackway lies at the northern end of the route in the townland of Lalor's Lot, where the earthen bank still holds its shape alongside the tarmac road. The bank and its thorn trees appear on Ordnance Survey maps as a field boundary immediately to the west of the modern road, a quiet cartographic clue to what may lie beneath the everyday infrastructure of the south Tipperary countryside.