In the townland of Gortacareen in County Kerry, a souterrain, an artificially constructed underground passage or chamber typically built during the early medieval period, was uncovered during drainage works at some point in the past century, only to be covered over again shortly afterwards. Today there are no visible remains whatsoever, leaving the site as a kind of double absence, a structure designed to be hidden, hiding still.

The souterrain sits within a rath, a circular earthwork enclosure of the sort that served as a farmstead during early medieval Ireland, roughly between the sixth and twelfth centuries. The rath at Gortacareen is a recorded monument in its own right, and it is within or beneath this enclosure that the souterrain was found and lost again. The passage may well be the same feature described as a 'cave' in material collected during the 1940s, when schoolchildren across Ireland were asked to record local traditions, lore, and curiosities as part of a national folklore-gathering effort. That a souterrain could be casually referred to as a cave in living memory says something about how these structures slipped between formal knowledge and local legend over the centuries.