The ground gives nothing away. No hollow, no depression, no telltale scatter of stone breaks the surface to suggest that something lies underneath. A souterrain is an underground stone-lined passage or chamber, typically associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, used variously for storage, refuge, or ventilation of a dwelling above. In Corbally, all that marks the site in living memory is the word "cave", passed down locally as a description of something people once knew about but can no longer point to.

The souterrain sits within a ringfort, the circular earthwork enclosure that was the standard farmstead type in early medieval Ireland, built and occupied roughly between the sixth and tenth centuries. Ringforts are common across Cork, but the combination of a souterrain within one, remembered through local tradition rather than visible archaeology, gives this particular site a slightly different quality. The knowledge that something is there has survived in language and story even as the physical evidence has retreated entirely below ground.