Beneath a field that was once part of a ringfort, an early medieval enclosure of the kind that once dotted the Irish countryside in their thousands, a souterrain lies buried and sealed. A souterrain is an underground stone-built passage or chamber, typically associated with ringforts and thought to have served as a place of refuge, storage, or concealment. This one was discovered not by archaeologists but by a plough, and whoever found it appears to have decided the simplest course of action was to fill it back in with stones and carry on. The ground above it now shows no trace that anything is there at all.

The find was recorded on the basis of local information rather than any formal excavation, which means the details are slim. What is known is that the chamber was single, that it came to light during agricultural work, and that it was subsequently back-filled. The ringfort it belongs to is a separate, catalogued feature on the same land. Together they point to a settlement of the early medieval period, roughly between the fifth and twelfth centuries, when ringforts served as the farmsteads of small landholders and their families. Souterrains were a fairly common feature of such sites across Munster, though many have been destroyed or disturbed over the centuries, often by precisely the kind of agricultural activity that brought this one briefly to light.