What survives above the surface amounts to a series of rectangular depressions, moss-covered and nettle-choked, their stone linings still just visible where the earth has not entirely swallowed them. These are the collapsed remains of a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber built, typically in early medieval Ireland, for storage or refuge beneath or adjacent to a fortified farmstead.

The site sits within the northwest quadrant of the ringfort recorded at Hazelfort, County Galway. Two contiguous depressions lie roughly 1.5 metres apart: the eastern one measures 3.4 metres north to south and 1.5 metres east to west, dropping to a depth of around 0.8 metres, with moss-covered stones still protruding from its north and east sides. The western depression is shallower at 0.3 metres but broader, running 4.8 metres by 3 metres, and is scattered with loose stone across its floor. A further depression, filled with nettles and measuring 5.5 metres by 3.5 metres, lies some 8 metres to the west of this, running parallel to the others. Whether this third hollow is part of the same souterrain system or a separate feature is uncertain, though its alignment and proximity make an association plausible.

Taken together, the depressions sketch out a structure that was once considerably more substantial than what is visible today. The rectangular plan and surviving stonework suggest at least two chambers or passages, now largely collapsed into the soil. Souterrains of this kind are found throughout Ireland in association with ringforts, the circular earthwork enclosures that were the dominant form of rural settlement from roughly the sixth to the twelfth centuries. The Hazelfort example is quietly informative in that very incompleteness: the way the earth has partially reclaimed the stonework, leaving just enough to read the outline, is itself a reasonably accurate picture of how much of early medieval rural life now presents itself to us.