Or rather, there was one. It occupies a subtriangular patch of ground roughly 800 metres from east to west and 600 metres from north to south, and it is invisible. No trace of it survives at ground level, no banked turns, no worn track, no obvious feature that would tell a walker what they were standing on. The only surviving evidence is cartographic: the Ordnance Survey's first-edition six-inch map, produced in the mid-nineteenth century, names and indicates the course with enough clarity to suggest it was a recognised feature at the time the surveyors passed through.

The OS six-inch maps, surveyed across Ireland from the 1820s to the 1840s, were meticulous documents, and the cartographers had no reason to mark a racecourse unless it was locally understood as one. Whether the course was still in active use at that point, or whether the surveyors were recording something already remembered rather than practised, is harder to say. What is known is that folk memories of the place were still circulating in the mid-nineteenth century, preserved in McNamara's 1901 account, where the racecourse at Coad appears in a footnote, the kind of detail that tends to survive precisely because someone thought it worth capturing before it slipped away entirely. The site was formally listed in the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996, which places it in the company of archaeological features deemed significant enough to protect, even when they leave no physical impression on the landscape.

That absence is, in its own way, the most interesting thing about it. Rural racecourses were a common enough feature of pre-Famine Ireland, informal affairs on open ground, tied to pattern days, fairs, or local custom, and many have vanished without record. The one at Coad at least has a name on a map and a footnote in a book, which is more than most of them managed.