It is a modest mark, but it set in motion a long, inconclusive trail of enquiry about what, if anything, was ever actually there.

A souterrain is an underground stone-lined passage or chamber, typically associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, used for storage, refuge, or both. Whether the Parkatilling cave was ever such a structure is genuinely uncertain. The same Ordnance Survey Field Name Books from 1837 noted two caves in the townland, adding, with a certain bureaucratic flatness, that they were 'in no way remarkable'. By 1983, when the site was formally examined, even that underwhelming presence had gone: the record from that year states simply 'no visible remains', and notes that a house had been built very close to the spot. Current thinking leans toward the feature having been a natural cave rather than a man-made souterrain at all, which would explain both the surveyors' indifference in 1837 and the absence of any structural trace later on.

What remains is essentially a cartographic ghost: a mark on a map, a field name, and a note that something unremarkable once existed somewhere nearby. The site itself has long since been absorbed into the ordinary landscape of mid-Westmeath.