On a gentle east-facing slope above Brandon Bay in County Kerry, the removal of a boundary wall exposed a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage of early medieval Irish construction, typically built as a place of refuge, storage, or concealment. This one had not been entirely unknown to the landscape, though its true nature had been obscured. It sat beneath or close to an irregularly shaped stone enclosure marked simply as 'Sheepfold' on the second edition of the Ordnance Survey map, a mundane label that had done nothing to hint at what lay underneath.

When Reynolds of the Office of Public Works inspected the structure, he found a passage roughly three metres long, running roughly north-north-west to south-south-east, and about a metre wide. The drystone walls tapered slightly inward as they rose, and three flat capstones covered the roof at a maximum height of one metre above the floor. That floor was flooded to half a metre when inspected, the southern end of the passage was completely blocked with earth, and the northern end had already been disturbed before anyone official arrived to look at it. What remained was, in other words, a fragment, just enough to confirm what it was before it was covered back over again. The enclosure that had sat above it, long since absorbed into the field boundary itself, was removed at the same time. The detail comes from the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey by J. Cuppage, which catalogued the extraordinary concentration of early remains across Corca Dhuibhne.

There is nothing to see at the surface today. The site was re-covered after inspection, the enclosure is gone, and the field boundary with which the whole arrangement was entangled has also been cleared away. What persists is the knowledge that a carefully constructed underground passage once ran here, facing out towards Brandon Bay, its original purpose unrecorded and now probably unrecoverable.