Souterrains, for those unfamiliar with the term, are man-made underground chambers and tunnels built during the early medieval period in Ireland, typically constructed from drystone walling and capped with large flat stones called lintels. They were associated with nearby settlement sites, probably serving for storage or as places of refuge. What makes the Ballykissane example quietly significant is precisely how little of it is known: it was the roofing lintels, disturbed by land improvement operations, that gave the structure away at all.

The exposure of those lintels in the early 1990s offered only a glimpse of whatever lies beneath. Land improvement work, which often involves deep ploughing or drainage schemes, is one of the more common ways that buried archaeology surfaces unexpectedly in rural Ireland, and the encounter here seems to have been incidental rather than investigative. The Iveragh Peninsula, running westward into the Atlantic in County Kerry, is densely layered with early medieval and prehistoric remains, and a souterrain at Ballykissane fits neatly within that wider pattern of settlement and activity, even if the specifics of this particular example remain largely unexamined.