Others are barely a ghost in the ground. At Rossbrien in County Limerick, what was once uncovered amounts to a cavity roughly 0.3 metres deep, its roof formed from thin stone slabs laid horizontally and running in under the surrounding sod. That modest description, passed on through local knowledge, is all that survives of what appears to have been a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber typically associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, used variously for storage, refuge, or as a cool place to keep dairy produce.

The record of the site depends almost entirely on a personal communication from Barry O'Reilly and was compiled by Denis Power, uploaded to the record in February 2013. The feature was located in flat, tilled agricultural land, approximately three metres west of a disused trackway and around five metres southeast of a field boundary running alongside a road. Those spatial details, modest as they are, suggest someone once took the trouble to note the find carefully before it disappeared again beneath the soil. When the site was inspected in 2004, no visible trace of the feature remained. The land had closed over it, whether through continued cultivation, collapse of the shallow roof slabs, or simple accumulation of disturbed earth.

There is, in practical terms, nothing to see at Rossbrien today. The surrounding landscape is ordinary agricultural ground, the kind that stretches across much of lowland Limerick without obvious drama. The value of visiting, if one were inclined, would lie in the exercise of reading a landscape for what it once held rather than what it currently shows: flat tilled fields, a disused trackway, a roadside field boundary. The souterrain, if that is indeed what it was, sits somewhere in that geometry, unconfirmed and unexcavated, the stone slabs presumably still there beneath the surface unless the plough has long since scattered them.