The only visible sign of their existence today is a small hole in the ground. It is an oddly modest marker for a structure that was once, by its very design, meant to be difficult to find.

This is a souterrain, a type of man-made underground passage or chamber system associated with early medieval Ireland, typically constructed between roughly the sixth and twelfth centuries. They were cut from earth or built from stone, and are generally thought to have served as places of refuge, storage, or both. The example at Shanaway Middle was discovered in 1962 on the eastern side of a roadway at the top of a hill. It consists of two rectangular chambers and one hemispherical chamber, arranged in a rough semi-circular pattern and connected by creepways, the low narrow passages that link one chamber to the next and would have forced anyone moving between them to crawl. Chamber one measures 2.75 metres long, 1.5 metres wide, and just under a metre in height; chamber two is slightly longer at 3.66 metres, but narrower and even lower at 0.76 metres high; the third chamber, hemispherical in shape, has a diameter of 2.44 metres and a height of 1.22 metres. These dimensions, recorded by McCarthy in 1977, give a sense of how confined the interior would have been. The original entrance was through chamber three; chamber one is now accessible only because its roof has collapsed.

The chambers are no longer accessible to visitors, and the site gives little away from the surface. That small hollow in the ground at the roadside is, for now, the full extent of what can be seen.