It is easy to walk past without knowing it exists, and that anonymity is part of what makes it worth knowing about. The entrance is barely large enough to admit a person: a passage just one metre long leads to an opening less than half a metre wide and under a metre high, the kind of gap that requires you to commit fully before you can see what lies beyond.

What lies beyond is a souterrain, a type of dry-stone underground structure built throughout early medieval Ireland, most commonly between roughly the sixth and twelfth centuries. Their precise purposes are still debated; storage of perishables, refuge, or ritual use have all been proposed, and the answer may vary from site to site. The Lateeve example is small but carefully made. Its walls are built in regular courses and corbel inward slightly at the top, meaning each successive layer of stone projects a little further inward than the one below, drawing the walls together until five flat roofing slabs can close the space overhead. The floor is paved with small irregular slabs. The chamber runs north to south, measuring 3.15 metres long, 0.7 metres wide, and 1.2 metres high; a space in which a person could lie at full length but not quite stand upright. Against the northern end-wall, silt has accumulated over time, quietly recording centuries of disuse.