On a steep, rocky mountain slope below and north of Lough Acummeen in County Kerry, there are no souterrains, and quite possibly never were. A souterrain, for the uninitiated, is an underground passage or chamber, typically dry-stone lined, associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, and often interpreted as a place of refuge or cold storage. The one recorded here exists only on paper.

In 1950, the Co. Kerry Field Club visited this location on the Dingle Peninsula and logged two features: a clochaun, and nearby, what appeared to be entrances suggesting crawl passages to souterrains. A clochaun is a small, corbelled dry-stone structure, often beehive-shaped, associated in this part of Kerry with early Christian hermits and monks. Except that this one, on closer inspection, is nothing of the sort. It is a roughly built sheep-fold. As for the crawl passages hinting at hidden underground chambers, later assessment found no visible indications of any souterrains in the vicinity at all. The likelier explanation is mundane and geological: natural caverns formed by overhanging rocks and boulders on a rugged mountain slope can present, to an enthusiastic eye, exactly like the mouth of something man-made and ancient. J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Corca Dhuibhne region, covering the Dingle Peninsula, arrived at this deflating but honest conclusion.

What remains is the landscape itself, the slope running down toward Lough Acummeen, the boulders arranged by nothing more deliberate than gravity and time. It is a reminder that the urge to find the past in a rocky hillside is old, persistent, and not always reliable.