To a casual eye they read as little more than subsidence, stony hollows where the ground has given way. But they mark the collapsed remains of a souterrain, an artificial underground passage or chamber built, typically in the early medieval period, for storage or refuge beneath a defended farmstead. What makes these particular features quietly interesting is their paper trail: cartographers, antiquarians, and fieldworkers have been noting them down, under various names, for nearly two centuries.

When the scholar and topographer John O'Donovan passed through in 1837 and recorded his observations for the Ordnance Survey Name Books, he described Kilpatrick Fort as containing two caves. That word, caves, stuck. The 1910 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map annotates the same features as 'Caves', depicting them as two small rectangular shapes, one near the centre of the ringfort and one just inside the bank in its north-eastern quadrant. By 1979, when someone visited and recorded them more formally, the caves had become depressions, large, roughly rectangular, and filled with small stones, which is precisely what a souterrain looks like once its roof has collapsed inward over time. The area to the north of the souterrain within the ringfort also showed signs of disturbance, suggesting the ground has been unsettled here for a long time. The ridge itself is set among undulating pasture with considerable rock outcrop nearby, giving the site wide views to the south, west, and north, the kind of position that early medieval farming communities often chose deliberately, for visibility as much as for the practicalities of drainage.