That bare fact is, for now, almost all that can be said with confidence, which is itself a quietly interesting situation. The feature has been formally recorded as a monument, meaning someone at some point considered it significant enough to document, yet the details that would explain its origins, its purpose, and its current state remain, for the moment, unavailable.

Canals in the west of Ireland tend to fall into a handful of categories: arterial navigation works from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, smaller drainage schemes carried out under various land improvement programmes, or the labour-relief cuttings made during and after the Famine years of the 1840s, when public works projects left their marks on the landscape in the form of roads, piers, and waterways that sometimes led nowhere in particular. Whether the Reask canal belongs to any of these traditions is not yet clear. The townland name itself, Reask, appears in several parts of Ireland and is generally thought to derive from the Irish "riasc", meaning a marsh or wetland, which would at least suggest a landscape where water management of some kind made sense.