The word itself comes from the French for "underground passage", and these structures, built during the early medieval period in Ireland, typically consist of one or more stone-lined chambers or tunnels, roofed with large lintels and buried under the earth. They are found in their hundreds across the country, often associated with nearby ringforts or settlement sites, and their purpose has been debated for generations; cold storage, refuge, ritual use, or some combination of all three are the most commonly proposed explanations. The one at Keel is recorded as a monument, which places it within a landscape that was clearly inhabited and organised by people who knew how to work stone and how to disappear into the ground when they needed to.

Beyond its location and classification, the details of this particular souterrain remain largely unrecorded in publicly available sources. What can be said is that Keel sits on the Dingle Peninsula, a part of Kerry long associated with early Christian settlement, ancient field systems, and a density of archaeological monuments unusual even by Irish standards. The peninsula preserves souterrains, ogham stones, beehive huts, and promontory forts in a landscape that has seen continuous human use for millennia. A souterrain here fits naturally into that pattern, even if the specifics of its construction, dimensions, and condition are not yet in the public domain.