The absence of any visible trace is part of what makes it so quietly disorienting. Walk across that ground and you would have no reason to suspect that a well-preserved souterrain, an artificially constructed underground chamber or series of passages typically associated with early medieval settlement, lies beneath your feet.

The structure came to light in 1978, not through archaeological excavation but through the levelling of a ringfort that once stood above it. Ringforts, which are enclosed farmsteads usually dating from roughly the sixth to the twelfth centuries, frequently contained souterrains that served as storage spaces, places of refuge, or both. The Cork Evening Echo reported the discovery on 17 April 1978. What the levelling work revealed was a souterrain with a single entrance leading into a number of connecting passages, all of it in good condition despite the disturbance above. The ringfort that had long marked the site on the surface is now gone, its enclosing bank removed in the course of the same work that accidentally exposed the underground complex beneath it. The souterrain survived; the monument that once gave it context did not.