Yet that depression marks the remains of a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber of the kind typically built during the early medieval period in Ireland, often for storage or as a place of refuge. The fact that so little is visible above ground is itself part of the story.

The souterrain sits at the centre of a levelled ringfort, a type of circular enclosed settlement that was the most common form of rural habitation in early medieval Ireland, usually defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches. That ringfort has been largely obliterated, leaving only its recorded outline. The souterrain within it, oriented on an east-west axis, is similarly reduced, its hollow representing what is left after the earthworks around it were cleared away. The two features together, the vanished enclosure and the near-vanished passage beneath it, point to a settlement that once had enough substance to require both a defended perimeter and an underground chamber, even if almost nothing of either now meets the eye.