It is the ghost of a road, or possibly two roads, one laid down after the Famine and one, if local memory is to be believed, considerably older than that.

When the site was first noted in 1972, local tradition held that the older cobbled surface had been built by Cromwell, a claim that places its origins somewhere in the mid-seventeenth century, during the period of the Cromwellian campaigns and subsequent plantation of Ireland. The present road alongside it was understood to have been constructed after the Famine, most likely as part of the relief road-building schemes of the 1840s, through which labourers were paid to construct roads and drainage works, many of which remain in everyday use. By 1984, when someone walked the ground to check, the cobbling itself had vanished entirely. What remained was only the faint trace of the old route, a slight raised bank discernible in aerial photographs and partially legible on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which was surveyed in the mid-nineteenth century and captures the landscape at a moment just before or during the Famine years. The road exists now mainly as an absence, a corridor in the land where something once ran and where the ground has not quite forgotten it.