Somewhere beneath a flat tillage field in County Kildare lies a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage of the kind built in early medieval Ireland, typically for storage or refuge, that has been almost entirely destroyed by people digging for buried treasure. What survives is the written account, not the stonework itself.

Writing between 1899 and 1902, a recorder named Darby described what he found: a stone-lined cave running diagonally across the interior of what appears to have been a moated site, a type of medieval enclosed homestead defined by earthen banks and ditches. Only one end had been opened, and even that had been badly damaged, as Darby put it, by "searchers after crocks of gold." The site sat within a levelled enclosure, and local tradition held that it had served as a place of refuge for monks connected to Kilart nunnery and Kilberry church, both of which lie within a few kilometres. Locally, the monument was known as "The Coreally", a name Darby linked tentatively to the French word couralé, meaning an underground fortification. Whether that etymology reflects an older Norman influence on the landscape, or simply a folk explanation grafted onto an unfamiliar word, is not recorded. What is clear is that the site carried a distinct identity in local memory long after any visible trace had gone.

No surface trace of the souterrain or the moated enclosure now remains. The field above it shows nothing of what lies, or once lay, beneath.