It is the kind of discovery that makes you reconsider what might lie beneath any ordinary field.

What the ground revealed was a souterrain, a type of man-made underground passage or chamber system associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, typically thought to have served as storage spaces, places of refuge, or both. This example consists of three subrectangular chambers arranged so that their long axes run parallel to one another, connected by low creepways. The floors of both the chambers and the creepways are cut directly into bedrock, and each chamber has a construction shaft at its northern end, openings that would have been used during the original building process to remove spoil from below. The two accessible chambers give some sense of the confined, deliberate architecture involved: the first measures roughly 2.3 metres long, 1.25 metres wide, and only 0.65 metres high, while the second is somewhat larger at 2.8 metres by 1.8 metres, with a height of around a metre. The third chamber has collapsed on its southern side and cannot be entered. The dimensions of the passable chambers make clear that moving through this structure would have required crawling, which is consistent with souterrains elsewhere in Ireland and may have been a deliberate defensive feature as much as a structural necessity.