These structures are found across the island in considerable numbers, often associated with nearby ringforts or settlement sites, and they served a variety of purposes, most likely as refuges, storage spaces, or places to keep dairy produce cool. The Kerry countryside holds a quiet concentration of them, many unannounced by any signage and detectable only as a slight depression in a field, a farmer's half-remembered reference, or a entry in an archaeological register.

Beyond its location in the Ballincollig townland of Kerry, the specific details of this particular souterrain, its dimensions, its construction, its relationship to any surrounding archaeology, remain unavailable at present. That absence is itself telling. Hundreds of Irish souterrains exist in a similar state of partial documentation, recorded as monuments but not yet fully described in any publicly accessible form. What can be said generally is that souterrains were typically dry-laid, using large flat stones to form walls and a corbelled or lintelled roof, and that their narrow, sometimes deliberately low entrances would have made them easy to defend or conceal. Some feature multiple chambers connected by tight crawlways. They are, in other words, deliberately awkward places, built to be hard to enter quickly.