At Coolawaleen in north County Cork, the ground holds the memory of a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber typically built during the early medieval period, used variously for storage, refuge, or as an annex to a nearby settlement. Nothing of it remains visible today. The enclosure in which it once sat has been levelled, and the souterrain itself has left no trace on the surface at all.

What is known comes from a single observation made in 1934 by a researcher named Bowman, who noted depressions on the east and south sides of the site as indicators of where the souterrain once lay. That small detail, a slight sinking of the earth in two directions, was enough to place it on the archaeological record. The enclosure it belonged to is catalogued separately, though it too has been levelled. Together, the two features describe a settled place that has been comprehensively erased, surviving only because someone thought to write down what the ground looked like nine decades ago.