The site is associated with a nearby ringfort, one of the thousands of circular earthwork enclosures built across Ireland during the early medieval period, typically as defended farmsteads. Souterrains, which are man-made underground chambers and tunnels usually constructed from stone, are a fairly common feature of ringforts; they served variously as places of refuge, cool storage for perishables, or concealed escape routes. What makes Roughgrove unusual is the absence of any physical evidence at all. There is no visible surface trace, no collapsed lintel, no telltale depression in the ground.

The tradition of underground passages at this location has been preserved locally rather than confirmed archaeologically. That gap between folk memory and verifiable record is itself a familiar feature of the Irish landscape, where stories of tunnels, hidden rooms, and subterranean routes attach themselves to earthworks, old estates, and ecclesiastical sites with remarkable persistence. Whether these particular passages ever existed, were filled in, collapsed entirely, or simply migrated in the telling from one place to another, is unknown. The ringfort with which they are associated has its own separate record, but the souterrain remains, for now, a matter of oral tradition rather than excavated fact.