The site belongs to a category of place that is easy to overlook precisely because there is nothing left to see: no mound, no stone, no earthwork breaking the surface. The ringfort that once enclosed it has been levelled, and the souterrain, an artificial underground passage or chamber typically built in early medieval Ireland for storage or refuge, survives only as a buried fact.

What is known comes almost entirely from a single observation. In 1937, a researcher named Broker recorded the existence of two rooms underneath the ground at this location, a note preserved in the archaeological record with little further elaboration. The ringfort with which the souterrain was associated, a circular enclosure of the kind that once numbered in the tens of thousands across Ireland, was already gone by that point, or at least no longer legible as an earthwork. Ringforts, also called raths, served as enclosed farmsteads during the early medieval period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries, and it was common for their occupants to construct souterrains beneath or adjacent to them. The two rooms Broker described would have been typical of the form, likely stone-lined and roofed with large slabs, accessible by a narrow creep passage.

There is nothing for a visitor to find at Gortnacreha today, and that absence is itself part of what makes the place interesting. The archaeology is real, documented, and entirely invisible, a reminder of how much of the early medieval landscape has been swallowed by centuries of farming. The two rooms are still there, in all likelihood, sealed under the soil.