The underground passage, sealed off in 1975, leaves no visible mark on the surface above it. A souterrain is a man-made underground structure, typically stone-lined, built during the early medieval period and used variously for storage, refuge, or concealment. This one, however, carries a more recent layer of memory attached to it, one that belongs not to the early medieval world but to a much later and grimmer chapter of Irish life.

McCarthy recorded the site in 1977, noting its position in the centre of a field, and local tradition held that the souterrain had served as a hiding place for a priest during the Penal Laws. The Penal Laws, enforced with varying severity from the late seventeenth century onward, banned Catholic worship and made the public practice of the faith a criminal matter. Priests who continued to minister to their congregations did so at considerable personal risk, and concealed spaces, whether natural or constructed, became part of the practical geography of survival. Whether this particular passage was adapted for that purpose or simply remembered that way in local oral tradition, the detail lodges itself in the mind. The structure was closed in 1975, two years before it was formally recorded, and whatever physical evidence it once offered is now inaccessible.