But Bóthairín na gCapall, which translates from the Irish as 'the little road of the horses', carries with it a layered past that the soggy ground around Lough Gur in County Limerick does little to advertise. The trackway runs NNE to SSW from the base of Killalough Hill, turning westward when it meets the former shoreline of the lake, and in aerial orthoimages taken between 2005 and 2020 it appears as a clear linear feature flanked on both sides by a ditch. What makes it quietly strange is what it was apparently heading towards: a medieval church, locally known as the Round Church, associated with the Desmond period, a time when the Fitzgerald Earls of Desmond held considerable sway over Munster. The church itself no longer stands in any obvious form, but the road that once served it persists, threading through a landscape dense with older monuments.

The primary written account of the road comes from Lynch, writing in 1913, who recorded the recollections of a local man. That account places the church site near a mound north of Killalough Hill, close to the eastern side of the causeway of the Black Castle, and notes that it was superseded by a new church built by Rachel, Dowager Countess of Bath. The name Killalough, the old man explained, means 'church of the lake', which gives the road its destination in plain enough terms. Crofton Croker, an earlier antiquarian, had noted the presence of a pillar stone near the junction of the trackway with the road to Holy Cross. The road does not appear on the 1840 Ordnance Survey six-inch map at all, though it turns up partially on the 1897 twenty-five-inch edition as a trackway leading from the roadside toward the former lake. The northern course of the trackway passes a bullaun stone, a boulder with one or more carved basins associated with early Christian and pre-Christian ritual use, and can be traced further north along the shore as an earthen embanked road, eventually connecting, on aerial imagery, to a farm complex at Ballingola.

The road sits roughly 225 metres northeast of the medieval church site at Lough Gur and 190 metres south of two crannóga, those artificial or partially artificial islands built in lakes and used as defended dwellings throughout early medieval Ireland, which sit to the north across the water. The area around the smaller of the Lough Gur lakes, on the southeastern side of Knockadoon and Knockmore, is accessible on foot, though the marshy pasture makes conditions underfoot variable, particularly in wetter months. The linear form of the trackway is most legible from aerial imagery rather than ground level, but the ditch lines can be read in the field with patience. The section running through what was once called Rusheen, meaning 'the little wood', on the eastern side of Killalough Hill, is noted as surviving in Lynch's time, and the surrounding landscape repays a slow, map-in-hand kind of attention.