A souterrain, to use the term, is a man-made underground chamber or tunnel, typically constructed during the early medieval period in Ireland as a place of refuge, storage, or concealment. At Lickbla, not even a hollow in the ground gives it away. The only clue is a berm, a narrow shelf of raised earth running along the inner face of the ringfort's inner bank, which may mark where the passage lies beneath.

The site sits on a prominent ridge with open views to the south-east, and is overlooked by the Hill of Mael roughly a kilometre to the north and the Rock of Curry about 1.3 kilometres to the north-west. This kind of elevated, inter-visible positioning is typical of early medieval settlement, where landscape awareness mattered. The ringfort itself still reads in the ground, and within it, on a circular-shaped platform, stands the faint outline of a rectangular house. Adams, writing in 1957, recorded that no surface trace of the souterrain was then visible, and that remains the case. The passage, if it survives at all, is entirely earthbound, known only through inference and the slight topographic irregularity of that inner berm.

What makes Lickbla quietly compelling is precisely this layering of absences. A ringfort enclosing a house platform enclosing, possibly, an underground structure that has left no mark on the surface. Each element is legible only as an outline or an inference, the landscape holding the shape of occupation without revealing much of its substance.