The site is what remains of a souterrain, an underground stone-built passage and chamber of the kind constructed during the early medieval period in Ireland, typically used for storage, refuge, or both. By the time anyone thought to record it properly, it was already gone.

The souterrain sits in the north-eastern quadrant of an early ecclesiastical enclosure, which suggests it was part of a monastic or church settlement of some antiquity. Writing in 1947, a researcher named Coleman described it as destroyed, but offered a reconstruction of what it had once been: a corbelled and lintelled passage, meaning the walls were built with stones overlapping inward and capped with flat slabs, leading into a beehive chamber, a domed underground room constructed using the same technique. This was a reasonably common design, and examples elsewhere in Ireland give a sense of how striking such spaces could be, low and close, built without mortar, shaped entirely by the careful placement of stone. At Ballymaclawrence, none of that survives intact. The southernmost of the three depressions does reveal a stretch of roughly coursed stone passage, mostly filled in with earth and debris, and a second depression to the north-west sits beside a pile of displaced material that may be the result of more recent, informal digging. A third depression lies a short distance to the east. The shape of the original structure can only be inferred from these traces and from Coleman's account.

There is something quietly melancholy about a site where the main evidence is what is no longer there. The ecclesiastical enclosure within which the souterrain once sat adds a layer of context, pointing to a period when this corner of north Cork was organised around religious life, with underground structures serving the practical needs of a community whose buildings above ground have fared no better.