These structures are found across Ireland in considerable numbers, and scholars continue to debate their precise function. Storage is the most widely accepted explanation, since the stable cool temperature underground suited the preservation of food and dairy produce. But souterrains were also used as places of refuge, and some were constructed with deliberately low or narrow passages designed to slow down an intruder. That combination of the practical and the defensive says something about the world in which they were built.

The townland name Currabanefield sits in Kerry, a county with a notably dense distribution of early medieval activity, from ring forts and promontory forts to ogham stones and monastic enclosures. A souterrain would typically be associated with a rath or cashel, the enclosed farmstead that formed the basic unit of rural settlement in early Christian Ireland, though the surface features of such enclosures are not always visible today, eroded by centuries of agriculture or simply absorbed back into the landscape. Without further detail it is not possible to say more about the specific history or condition of this particular example, but its presence alone marks the field above it as ground with a long memory.