The name carries its own quiet suggestion: that friars once walked this route, moving between religious houses through landscape that would have been, even by the standards of the west of Ireland, difficult and saturated terrain. The road came to light not through excavation but through the ordinary work of turf-cutting in 1977, when a section of it surfaced from the peat.

What was revealed is a togher, a type of timber causeway laid across boggy ground that was a common engineering solution in early medieval Ireland. Builders would use split or round timbers, brushwood, and sometimes stone to create a stable surface over land that would otherwise be impassable. The Clooncullaun example is poorly preserved but still legible in outline: roughly 48 metres long and just over two metres wide, its axis running west-south-west to east-north-east. Local tradition holds that it once connected a church at Timacat to a monastery at Moat, some four kilometres to the north-west. Whether that tradition preserves a genuine memory of the road's function or is a later interpretation attached to a mysterious feature in the bog, nobody can now say with certainty. But the alignment is plausible, and the name Friar's Pass suggests the association with religious movement was deeply enough embedded to survive into living memory. The bog, ironically, is what preserved it; peat's anaerobic, acidic conditions are hostile to decay, which is why Irish bogs have yielded ancient timbers, bodies, and objects that would have vanished in drier ground long ago.