It is a souterrain, a type of man-made subterranean structure built throughout early medieval Ireland, typically by corbelling or lintelling local stone into chambers and connecting tunnels. Their purposes likely varied: cold storage, refuge, or a combination of both. Hundreds survive across Ireland, some still intact enough to crawl through, others collapsed to a shallow depression in a field. The one at Glebe belongs to this quietly numerous category of monument, known to exist but not widely documented in accessible form.

Souterrains in Kerry tend to be associated with early Christian period settlement, roughly the sixth to twelfth centuries, when ringforts and cashels dotted the landscape and communities needed both domestic storage and, at times, somewhere to disappear into at short notice. The Glebe townland name itself is a clue to later ecclesiastical geography, glebe lands being those historically set aside to support a parish priest, which suggests the area carried administrative and religious significance across several different periods. Whether the souterrain predates that ecclesiastical layer or sits in some relationship to it is the kind of question that requires closer investigation than the surviving record currently allows.