Yet something of this site near the Cummeragh river in Cooryvanaheen, Co. Kerry has stubbornly refused to disappear. Beneath where the ringfort once stood, a souterrain, the kind of drystone underground passage used in early medieval Ireland for storage or refuge, has begun to reveal itself through the collapse of its own roof.

The ringfort may be the same site recorded in the Ordnance Survey Name Books as 'Barna Fort', described there simply as an earthen fort. It occupied a level terrace on ground that slopes eastward down to the Cummeragh river, a quiet but telling choice of location. Ringforts, known in Irish as raths, were typically enclosed farmsteads of the early medieval period, and many concealed souterrains within their interiors. The one here is a modest but complex arrangement: a drystone passage running roughly east-west for three metres, averaging one metre deep and one metre wide, leading through a strikingly tight creepway, just 27 centimetres high by 54 centimetres wide, into a second passage running northward for a further three metres. A possible third passage branches from the western end, though collapse makes it impossible to confirm. That creepway, barely large enough to squeeze through, is a feature found in souterrains across Ireland, thought to slow or deter anyone trying to force entry.

What survives at Cooryvanaheen is essentially the negative space of a vanished enclosure: the underground skeleton of a settlement whose surface has been erased. The exposed roofing lintels, displaced and tumbled, are what give it away, small slabs of stone that once sealed a hidden network beneath an unremarkable field on the Iveragh Peninsula.