The passage, or souterrain, does not sit beneath the ground in the conventional sense but is instead tucked within the very thickness of the structure's northern wall, a design that makes the building and the hiding place essentially one object.

Souterrains are underground or semi-underground stone-lined passages, built without mortar, that appear across early medieval Ireland and are generally associated with settlement sites. Their purposes are debated, though storage and refuge are the most widely accepted explanations. This example on the Dingle Peninsula is modest by any measure: 3.2 metres long, a metre wide, and only 0.7 metres high, meaning anyone entering would have had to crawl. It connects, through a lintelled opening, to the adjoining circular stone hut known locally as a clochán, though that opening is now blocked. The clochán itself stands around 1.6 metres high with walls between 1.4 and 2 metres thick, and it is within that considerable mass of stone that the passage is concealed. The site was documented by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Corca Dhuibhne archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, a thorough regional inventory that brought dozens of such quietly remarkable features into the scholarly record.