Towards the mouth of the Cloon valley in County Kerry, a short distance south-east of the Owenroe river, there once stood a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber typically associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, used for storage, refuge, or both. No surface trace of it survives today, which places it in a category of site that archaeology must acknowledge but cannot easily study: a structure known to have existed, documented by local memory, and now entirely gone.

The loss was not gradual. Sometime around the 1920s, the stones used in the souterrain's construction were quarried away, repurposed for other building work as was common practice when older structures were seen as a convenient source of dressed or worked stone. A standing stone that once stood nearby suffered the same fate at the same time. The two removals together suggest a systematic clearance of older features from the area rather than casual pilfering. What had stood in that valley for perhaps a thousand years or more was dismantled within what local information suggests was a single episode of quarrying.