No earthwork breaks the surface, no lintel protrudes from the grass. The only reason it appears in any record at all is local memory, passed down and eventually written down, of the day in the 1930s when the souterrain was partly opened and a number of people went in.

A souterrain is an underground passage or chamber, typically built in early medieval Ireland from dry-laid stone, and most often associated with a nearby ringfort or rath. That connection holds here: the souterrain lies in a field to the north of a rath at Gortshanavogh, the two features almost certainly belonging to the same settlement. What happened during that partial opening in the 1930s is not recorded in any detail; only the fact of it survives, preserved in local information cited by O'Hare in 1997. Since then, and presumably for a long time before, the passage has been sealed again beneath the pasture, leaving no visible remains whatsoever.

There is, in practical terms, nothing to see at Gortshanavogh. What the site offers instead is a particular kind of historical situation, fairly common in rural Ireland but rarely so plainly stated: the knowledge that something is there, held in living memory long enough to be written down, without any physical trace remaining above ground to confirm it.