The rectangular depression runs east to west and sits in the north-western corner of what remains of a rath, the kind of enclosed farmstead that was the most common form of defended settlement in early medieval Ireland. That a souterrain, an underground stone-lined tunnel typically used for storage or refuge, might lie beneath this particular rath is not unusual in itself; souterrains are found at rath sites across the country. What is unusual is how little survives here above ground to frame that possibility, making the hollow feel more like a question than a feature.

The rath itself measures roughly 32 metres north to south and 22 metres east to west, and what remains of it is a patchwork of earthworks in varying states of survival. The inner bank is still legible along a stretch from the north-west through to the north-north-east, but elsewhere the boundary is defined only by a scarp, a natural-looking slope that is, on closer inspection, the worn remnant of an enclosing element. The outer bank and the two fosses, the ditches that would have reinforced the sense of boundary and provided material for the banks, also survive along that same north-western arc. The rest has been absorbed by grass and time. The overall impression is of a site that has been slowly digested by the landscape rather than dramatically ruined, the kind of place where the archaeology is legible only if you already know roughly what you are looking at.