A souterrain is an underground stone-lined passage or chamber, typically associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, used variously for storage, refuge, or ventilation of a dwelling above. The trouble with the one at Sraheens is that by 2003, when someone went to look for it, there was nothing left to see at ground level.

The site has a quietly peculiar bureaucratic history. It never appeared on any edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, which were produced across several revisions from the nineteenth century onwards, meaning it left no cartographic trace across generations of surveying. It was also absent from the Sites and Monuments Record of 1989, which was the standard national inventory of its time, but had made its way into the Record of Monuments and Places by 1995. That six-year gap between exclusion and inclusion suggests the site was identified or reconsidered at some point in the early 1990s, though whatever evidence prompted that decision had apparently left no lasting impression on the field itself. When an inspection was carried out in 2003, the pasture showed nothing.