The one at Ballycatten in County Cork presents a rather different picture. By the time archaeologists reached it, the structure appears to have already lost its roof and been put to a quite different use: the dumping of domestic waste. Chamber one, a compact space measuring roughly two metres long and just over a metre wide, was found packed with limpet and periwinkle shells alongside a large quantity of animal bones and teeth. The image that emerges is less of a refuge or storage space and more of a midden, an informal rubbish deposit, which makes it an unusually candid window into the everyday life of whoever occupied the ringfort above.

The souterrain sits within a ringfort, the circular enclosed farmstead that was the standard unit of rural settlement across early medieval Ireland, and was one of three such underground structures discovered during excavation by Ó Ríordáin and Hartnett in 1943. All three chambers are rectangular and mostly cut directly into bedrock, with stone walling used in places where the rock alone was insufficient; that walling has an outward batter, meaning it leans slightly away from the vertical, a construction technique that helped distribute the weight of any covering above. The finds recovered were modest but telling: a fragment of bronze plate, a wall brad (a type of nail or fixing), and an axe head dated broadly to between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries. That wide date range signals the difficulty of pinning down exactly when the structure fell out of its original use and began its secondary life as a deposit for kitchen refuse.