Around 1940, so the accounts go, steps were discovered leading down into the interior of a nearby rath, the kind of enclosed earthwork farmstead that dots the Irish countryside in its thousands. Those steps, if they existed, likely led to a souterrain, an underground passage or chamber built of stone and earth, typically used in early medieval Ireland for storage, refuge, or both. No formal excavation appears to have followed, and the steps, along with whatever lay beneath them, seem to have slipped back out of the record.

The rath itself, catalogued separately, sits in the same townland and is the context within which any underground feature would make sense. Souterrains are commonly found in association with raths, constructed to serve the households that occupied these enclosed settlements from roughly the early centuries AD through to the Norman period. The Knocknalour reports are described as widespread among local people, which gives them a certain weight even in the absence of physical evidence. Community memory around archaeological features in rural Ireland is often more tenacious than it might appear, occasionally pointing excavators toward genuine discoveries decades or even generations later. Whether that is the case here remains, for now, an open question.