All that marks the spot above ground is a shallow, roughly circular depression, just 1.3 metres across and about a quarter of a metre deep, the kind of subtle hollow that most walkers would step over without a second thought. What it signals, however, is a souterrain, an underground chamber of the sort built throughout early medieval Ireland, typically as a place of refuge, storage, or concealment.

The souterrain sits within a rath, the remains of a circular earthen enclosure used as a farmstead during the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Raths are extremely common across the Irish countryside, and it was not unusual for their occupants to construct underground passages or chambers beneath them, accessible by stone-cut steps exactly as described here. At some point in the 1930s, the entrance to this particular chamber was closed, presumably for safety reasons, leaving the space intact below but unreachable from above. The local knowledge that preserved the detail about the stone steps is itself significant; without it, the depression might read as nothing more than natural subsidence.