Sir Donat's Road, in the townland of Kiltacky More in north-west Clare, offers none of that. The roughly 400-metre section recorded here has been absorbed entirely into improved pasture running along the north-eastern edge of exposed limestone pavement, and no visible surface trace survives. What remains is essentially a name and a line on old maps, which is, in its own way, more interesting than another rutted boreen.

The road was a 17th-century construction built under the auspices of Donat O'Brien, and it was no modest local track. The antiquarian T. J. Westropp, writing in 1900, described it as a long road or lane-way extending from Leamaneh Castle, the dramatic tower house on the edge of the Burren associated with the O'Brien family, for many miles eastward through the landscape. In the Kiltacky More section, the road ran roughly north-west to south-east, meeting the modern road at its south-eastern end opposite a church and graveyard. The route was still intermittently legible on the 1897 Ordnance Survey 25-inch plan and again on the Cassini edition of the 6-inch map from 1920, though even then it appeared only in fragments. By 1977, Tim Robinson had taken care to mark and name it on his celebrated two-inch map of the uplands of north-west Clare, a small act of cartographic preservation for a feature that was already, on the ground, essentially gone.

The limestone pavement that edges this part of the route is characteristic Burren terrain, the bare carboniferous rock scored into blocks and fissures by millennia of rainwater. That the road once passed alongside it, connecting a significant O'Brien stronghold to the wider countryside, is a detail that the modern landscape gives no reason to suspect.