That uncertainty is, in its own way, the whole story. Local tradition holds that an underground passage runs beneath this stretch of land, the kind of feature archaeologists classify as a souterrain, a deliberately constructed underground chamber or corridor typically associated with early medieval settlement and used variously for storage, refuge, or ventilation. The problem is that when someone actually went looking in 1994, there was nothing visible at ground level to confirm it.

The tradition is tied to an enclosure that once stood at the site, a defined area likely bounded by earthworks or a bank and ditch, of the sort commonly associated with early Irish farmsteads or ringforts. That enclosure has since been levelled, its physical form erased by centuries of agriculture or land clearance. References to the underground passage appear in correspondence held by the National Museum of Ireland dating to 1961, and were noted again by the archaeologist M. J. O'Kelly in 1969. O'Kelly was a significant figure in Irish archaeology, best known for his excavations at Newgrange, so his passing mention of the Baronsland tradition, however briefly, gives it a degree of scholarly acknowledgement even if no excavation was ever carried out. Whether the souterrain was real, partially collapsed, or simply a story that attached itself to an already-vanished earthwork is a question the landscape has not answered.