What makes it quietly remarkable is not its appearance but its function: this was not simply a road to a church, but a deliberately structured approach to a fortified religious site, threading through gateways in the walls of an outer court.

The road served the Augustinian Priory at Kells, running from the present public road to a fortified entrance in the eastern wall of the priory's outer court. A second arm extended from an entrance in the western wall of that same court towards the nearby motte, the flat-topped earthen mound of a Norman castle that formed part of the wider Kells settlement. A motte is typically the raised core of an early Norman fortification, sometimes topped with a timber tower and surrounded by an enclosure. The juxtaposition here is significant: the road physically linked the ecclesiastical and the military, reflecting the intertwined nature of Anglo-Norman religious and defensive planning in medieval Kilkenny. The route was documented through fieldwork carried out in the early 1990s, drawing on the observations of archaeologist Con Manning.