That much is certain, because the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map, the great nineteenth-century cartographic project that named and fixed the Irish landscape in extraordinary detail, marks it plainly and gives it no other label than that single word. What the tunnel actually is, what it connects or conceals, and who made it, remains unrecorded beyond the fact that it dates from after 1700. The six-inch maps were surveyed in the 1830s, so the feature was already present and considered notable enough to name by that point, even if no further explanation was thought necessary by the surveyors who passed through.

The townland name Gortacreenteen derives from the Irish, suggesting a small field or enclosure associated with a personal name or minor local feature. The tunnel itself could be any number of things: a drainage culvert, a passage beneath a laneway or field boundary, or something more deliberately architectural. Post-1700 places it in the era of improving landlords and estate works, when tunnels were sometimes constructed to carry water, to allow labourers to move between fields without crossing the main approach to a house, or simply as functional infrastructure on a managed estate. Without further documentation, none of these possibilities can be confirmed over the others.