What archaeology actually finds is rather less dramatic, though no less intriguing: a nettle-choked hollow in the ground, roughly five and a half metres long and just over two metres wide, sinking to about half a metre in depth and oriented roughly east-northeast to west-southwest. That depression is almost certainly the collapsed roof of a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber built during the early medieval period, typically used for storage or as a place of refuge. The gap between a community's memory of a cave and what survives on the surface tells its own quiet story about how these places persist in local consciousness long after the physical evidence has largely disappeared.

The ringfort this souterrain belongs to is a separate monument in its own right, and it is common for souterrains to be found within such enclosures, which were the farmsteads of early medieval Ireland. What accelerated the disappearance of this particular underground structure is a detail almost too familiar in Irish archaeology: the landowner removed a large slab from the site at some point, taking away one of the last legible pieces of the structure's fabric. A single removed stone can be the difference between a monument that survives and one that silently subsides into the surrounding earth, leaving only a dip in the field and a story about a cave.