A cashel is a stone-walled ringfort, the kind of enclosed settlement that dots the Irish landscape from the early medieval period, and souterrains, the underground stone-lined tunnels sometimes found within them, served likely as storage spaces or places of refuge. What makes this particular site quietly curious is that the souterrain reaching beyond the enclosure wall to the south-east seems to defy the usual expectation of such features as purely internal, domestic spaces.

The earliest map evidence comes from the Ordnance Survey six-inch first edition, which marks two features labelled simply as 'Caves' along the interior northern and southern sections of the cashel. That cartographic label is telling: by the time the surveyors passed through, local memory of the features appears to have attached itself to a more vernacular description rather than any technical understanding of their likely early medieval origins. The two-souterrain count was noted by King in 1931 and later included in the archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan, published by Cork University Press in 1996. The Iveragh Peninsula is unusually dense with early medieval enclosures and associated features, and this site fits into a broader pattern of settled agricultural communities who constructed both their living spaces and their underground annexes from the stone so abundantly available across south Kerry.