A souterrain, as these dry-stone tunnels are known, was typically built during the early medieval period as a place of refuge, storage, or concealment, cut into the earth and lined with carefully laid stone. What makes this particular example quietly melancholy is that almost nothing of it survives. The rise is still there, and the view from it is still good, but the site itself has been reduced to near nothing by the slow pressure of agricultural activity over many generations.

The earliest clear record of the site appears on the Ordnance Survey map of 1841 to 1842, which marks a circular enclosure at this spot with the word "cave" noted in the interior. That label almost certainly refers to the souterrain. By the time the 1916 edition of the map was produced, the picture had already changed significantly: field banks had been cut across the site, and the eastern section was no longer depicted at all. The enclosure that once surrounded the souterrain, a circular stone bank, has been almost entirely flattened. What remains is a short arc running from the south to the west, a bank some four metres wide that still rises to around sixty centimetres above the interior level and a more considerable one metre forty above the ground outside. That difference in height between interior and exterior hints at the original form, a raised, defined space set deliberately apart from the surrounding land, chosen for the commanding view it offered across the countryside.