It is the kind of quietly dismaying detail that turns up in Irish archaeology with some regularity, though it rarely makes the stones any easier to trace. The souterrain in question sits within a rath at Rathmalode, a ringfort, overgrown and wet, on a south-facing slope above the valley of the Emlagh river. Coniferous trees now occupy the interior, and the site has been interfered with considerably over the years, leaving it in a state that is easier to characterise as lost than as surviving.

A souterrain is an underground stone-built passage or chamber, typically associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, used variously for storage, refuge, or both. At Rathmalode, the souterrain is now marked only by a shallow depression in the ground, its stonework presumably among the considerable quantity of material removed from the site over time. Just to the north of this depression, a curving earth and stone bank, roughly 2.5 metres wide and 0.25 metres high, may represent the northern half of a circular hut. The ogham stones that once formed part of the souterrain's fabric were removed at some point and carried to the adjacent townland of Lougher, where they were set into buildings as door-lintels, functional objects rather than inscribed monuments. Ogham script runs in notches and scores along the edges of a stone, and repurposed ogham stones are not rare in Kerry; the Dingle Peninsula has one of the highest concentrations of them anywhere in Ireland, which perhaps made individual stones seem less irreplaceable than they were.