The site is listed as a souterrain, one of those dry-stone underground passages or chambers built throughout early medieval Ireland, typically as places of refuge, storage, or concealment beneath a settlement. Yet the record amounts to a single, quietly haunting observation: local tradition holds that one exists here, and there is no visible surface trace.

That combination, a living local memory and an absence of physical evidence, is more common in Irish archaeology than it might seem. Souterrains were built to be unobtrusive, their entrance stones flush with the ground or deliberately disguised, and many have survived centuries of agriculture and land disturbance simply by remaining invisible. At Glenaphuca, whatever lies beneath has left no mark above ground that surveyors have been able to identify. The place name itself carries a suggestion of otherworldly character, "gleann" being the Irish for valley and "phuca" referring to the púca, a shapeshifting spirit of Irish folklore associated with liminal, often underground, spaces. Whether that connection shaped the local tradition or merely coloured it over time is impossible to say.

What remains is the tradition itself, passed on through a community that apparently knew, or believed it knew, that the ground held something. In the absence of excavation or visible remains, that oral memory is the only evidence on record.