The slab sits in the eastern sector of a raised interior area, and archaeologists have suggested it could be the remnant of a souterrain, an artificially constructed underground passage or chamber of the kind commonly built during the early medieval period in Ireland, typically used for storage or as a place of refuge.

The slab lies within a univallate rath, a type of enclosed farmstead defined by a single surrounding earthen bank or fosse, positioned on low-lying ground to the south-east of Smerwick Harbour. This coastal corner of the Corca Dhuibhne, the Dingle Peninsula, is dense with early medieval remains, and the site was documented by J. Cuppage in the 1986 archaeological survey of the peninsula. The suggestion that the prostrate slab marks a souterrain remains tentative, the word "possibly" doing considerable work in the record, but the combination of a rath and an underground feature would not be unusual. Souterrains are frequently found in association with raths across Ireland, built by the same farming communities who raised the enclosing banks around their homesteads.

The site sits in a landscape that rewards slow attention. The low ground near Smerwick Harbour holds several layers of history in close proximity, and the rath itself, even without a confirmed souterrain, offers a quiet sense of how this coastline was once organised and occupied.