That detail alone would make this souterrain, a type of stone-lined underground passage or chamber typically associated with Early Christian ringforts and thought to have served as storage or refuge, worth noting. What makes the situation stranger is that those inscribed stones are no longer in Cork, or indeed in Ireland.

The structure sits in the south-western quadrant of a ringfort at Rooves More and was first examined in 1865 by Augustus Lane-Fox, who later became better known as General Pitt-Rivers, the pioneering figure in British archaeology. As described by McCarthy in 1977, the main chamber is earth-cut, roughly rectangular, measuring around 4.5 metres long and 2.43 metres wide, though only about 0.6 metres high, meaning anyone inside would have been crawling. Six stone pillars arranged in two longitudinal rows supported a double course of capstones, the first course laid transversely, the second lengthways. Three of those upper capstones bore ogham inscriptions. An entrance passage at the north-western end, partially closed by a slab, runs westward then bends south-west, sloping gently upward to the surface. A possible second chamber at the northern end of the main chamber was never investigated. The souterrain has since been sealed.

The ogham stones removed from the site are now held in the British Museum in London, a fate that was far from unusual for Irish antiquities uncovered during the nineteenth century. The ringfort above ground remains at Rooves More, but visitors to the site today will find the underground chamber inaccessible, and its most legible remnants in a collection many hundreds of miles away.