There has been a fall-off in the numbers visiting the Corlea Trackway centre, one of the newest tourist attractions in the midlands. In 1994, the first year of operation, 3,966 people visited the site. This rose to 5,311 the following year but fell in 1996 to 4,286. The figures for last year, 1997, fell to the lowest level so far, 3,768.
It was 148 years before the birth of Christ when the people who lived beside Lanesboro, Co Longford, cut down the oak trees in the area to make a giant road.
No one knows where that road, which ran through Mountdillon bog, 13 km south of Longford town and 1.5 km west of the village of Keenagh, was headed.
Could it have been a royal road, running from Tara in Meath to Croghan, the ancient seat of power in Connacht which is not too far away?
The bog is known to local people at Ringdong Bog but Bord na Mona, which works the peat there, calls it Corlea Bog and that is the name by which it is known nationally and internationally.
In the years since Bord na Mona has been exploiting the peat there, no one knows how much of the trackway was destroyed by the milling operations.
Even before Bord na Mona took over the bog, local farmers knew there was a large road there with vast amounts of oaken logs laid down like a primitive railway line.
They called it the Danes' Road but it was not until 1984 that the existence of the road came to the attention of scientists, who were amazed at its size.
With the aid of modern technology and a system called dendrochronology, the timbers used were dated in Belfast and found to have been felled in 148 BC.
The publicity generated by the discovery of the road led eventually to the recovery of some of the trackway, the first to be dated to the Iron Age, and the inevitable interpretative centre.
Unlike most of the proposed centres being build at the time by the Office of Public Works, the local people were fully behind the Corlea Trackway Centre.
There was no local opposition, only support and, in a community initiative, a local development group took over the running of the restaurant in the centre.
The hope is that this year will bring the numbers visiting the centre back up again.