These structures, built roughly between the sixth and twelfth centuries, served a variety of purposes: storage, refuge, or concealment. They are found in their hundreds across Ireland, often associated with nearby ringforts, and their presence in the landscape is easy to miss entirely, the ground above giving little away.

The Farran souterrain sits within a part of Kerry that saw continuous settlement across many centuries, a county whose early medieval archaeology ranges from monastic remains to secular farmsteads enclosed by earthen or stone banks. Souterrains were typically dug into subsoil and lined with dry-stone walling, roofed with large lintels, and connected by low, sometimes deliberately awkward crawl-ways designed to slow an intruder. The labour involved in constructing one was considerable, suggesting the community that built it had reason enough to invest in concealment or cool underground storage for dairy produce and other perishables.

Very little specific detail about this particular site has been formally published or made publicly accessible to date, which itself says something about how many such monuments remain quietly unexamined in the Irish countryside, known to local memory or recorded only in outline, waiting on the slower work of documentation to catch up with them.