Somewhere beneath a levelled field in County Cork lies a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber built during the early medieval period, typically for storage or refuge, that was discovered in 1966, recorded, and promptly buried again. No earthwork marks the spot. No signage acknowledges it. The ground gives nothing away.

The souterrain had sat within a ringfort, the circular enclosed settlements that were the dominant form of rural habitation in Ireland between roughly the sixth and twelfth centuries. When the ringfort at Ballinluska was levelled in 1966, the underground structure came to light, noted by Ó Murchadha in 1967. It was then infilled. The act of destruction was also, briefly, an act of discovery, and what was found was documented just enough to confirm its existence before it was sealed away again. The ringfort itself is now gone too, its enclosing banks and ditches flattened in the same operation.