Souterrains are underground stone-lined passages or chambers, built predominantly in early medieval Ireland and often associated with settlement sites; they served variously as places of refuge, storage, or retreat. The problem with this particular one is that when investigators went looking for it in 1998, they found nothing at all.

The paper trail is thin but intriguing. An Office of Public Works file, referenced under Sheet 4, records the souterrain's supposed location, but offers little else. More tantalising is a source cited by Warren in 1892: a letter published in the Saunders News-letter in 1780, written from somewhere in the Burren. The letter describes an underground stone-cut burial chamber or crypt, complete with an undated memorial stone, situated near what it calls the Abbey of St Daragh. Whether this correspondence and the OPW note are describing the same feature, or two entirely separate things, remains unresolved. St Daragh, or Dara, lends her name to the townland itself, Oughtdarra deriving from the Irish for St Dara's field, which suggests a site of some ecclesiastical significance, even if the physical traces have long since become impossible to locate with any certainty.

What survives here is essentially a problem rather than a monument: a place recorded in administrative files, glimpsed in an eighteenth-century newspaper letter, and then effectively lost to view. The 1998 inspection produced no visible evidence, and the connection between the buried chamber described in 1780 and the coordinates on the OPW sheet remains genuinely uncertain. It is the kind of gap in the record that the Burren, with its limestone pavements and long habit of concealing what lies beneath, seems almost designed to produce.