In 1927, a researcher named Ua Riain noted that the structure gave access to rooms beneath a cahir, the Irish term for a stone ringfort. That detail, modest as it sounds, implies a subterranean network of some scale, connected to a substantial defended settlement above ground.

What makes the site quietly unsettling is that none of this can now be confirmed. When the site was examined more recently, there was no indication of any such passages. The eastern end of the chamber is obscured by collapse, which may account for some of the disappearance, but the full extent of what Ua Riain described remains unverifiable. He also recorded a circular depression near the centre of the site, a feature that might have marked a structural or ritual element of the cahir complex. That too has since vanished from the visible record, leaving a place where the archaeology of the 1920s and the archaeology of today tell noticeably different stories. Whether the passages were blocked, collapsed entirely, or were perhaps misread in the original observation, is not currently known.