These structures, the word coming from the French for "underground stream", were dug and lined with drystone walling, then capped with lintels and buried. Their precise purposes are still debated, but they are generally understood to have served as cold storage, as refuges, or both, connected to a settlement or ringfort at the surface. Kerry has a notable concentration of them, tucked into farmland that has been worked continuously for well over a thousand years.

Beyond its classification and location, the details of this particular souterrain, its dimensions, its condition, whether it remains accessible or has collapsed, what relationship it may have had to any surrounding settlement features, remain unrecorded in any publicly available form at present. That absence is itself telling. Many of Ireland's smaller underground monuments exist in a state somewhere between known and unknown, noted on maps, assigned a record number, but not yet fully documented. The souterrain at Ranaleen sits in that category, a structure old enough to have outlasted the society that built it, but still waiting to be properly described.