That telltale bumpiness, invisible to most passing eyes, turned out to be a record of something happening underground for well over a thousand years.

The site sits within a substantial archaeological complex on Slievereagh, the grey-streaked mountain in south County Limerick, on what antiquarians identified as the supposed site of Temaír Erann, the ancient cemetery of the Ernai tribe. The scholar Thomas Johnson Westropp wrote about the wider complex in the years around 1917 to 1919, recognising its significance within the local landscape. It was Seán P. Ó Ríordáin, however, who excavated this particular enclosure, designated Ringfort 4 of the Southern Group, between 1934 and 1935. His findings, published in 1940, revealed a central hearth, a series of post-holes cut into the bedrock suggesting a timber structure, and partial dry-stone walls that pointed to an overground building associated directly with the souterrain entrance. No complete house plan could be recovered, but the fragments were suggestive enough: people had lived here in some organised fashion, moving between a domestic interior and a deliberately concealed underground space reached not by a stone causeway but, as Ó Ríordáin concluded, by a wooden gangway across the fosse. The ringfort is the middle of three conjoined enclosures and sits inside a large field system, all of which adds to the sense that this was once a busy, organised settlement rather than a single isolated dwelling.

The site lies in rough pasture and remains under Preservation Order 34, issued in January 1935 shortly after excavation began. A post-1700 field boundary, an earth and stone fence, bisects the enclosure along an east-west line, passing directly through what was once its entrance on the western side. That fence remains a useful orientation point for a visitor, as is the subtly uneven ground to the south of it, where the souterrain's collapsed roof still registers as a gentle, irregular depression in the turf. Satellite imagery confirms the circular outline of the fosse quite clearly, so checking an aerial map beforehand is worthwhile before approaching across open pasture.