What was once a deliberate architectural feature of early medieval Irish life has effectively vanished from the surface, leaving no visible trace of what earlier investigators found when they looked.

A souterrain is an underground structure, typically comprising one or more narrow passages and chambers lined and roofed with stone, built beneath or adjacent to a ringfort as a place of refuge or storage. When the archaeologist P. J. Hartnett examined this one in 1939, the entrance measured forty-two inches wide and twenty-eight inches high, opening onto a downward slope that led into a collapsed passage roofed with stone slabs. Local knowledge at the time held that there were several chambers further in, though Hartnett could trace the structure on the surface for only about twenty feet. Whether those chambers survived in any form beneath the ground, or had already been crushed by subsidence, is not recorded. By the time the site was being compiled into the Archaeological Inventory of County Cork in the 1990s, even that surface trace had gone.

The ringfort within which the souterrain sits is a separate recorded monument, and the souterrain occupies its western half. There is nothing to see at ground level today, which is in some ways the most telling detail of all: a structure built specifically to be concealed has succeeded, at least partially, beyond its makers' intentions.