Most people who know the name associate it with the Gleninsheen Gorget, a gold collar of extraordinary craftsmanship dating to around 700 BC, found in a rock crevice in the Burren in 1932 and now among the prize possessions of the National Museum of Ireland. But the gorget is not the only trace of human activity in this limestone landscape. A hut site recorded in the area points to a more ordinary kind of presence, the remnants of a structure where someone, at some point, simply lived.

Hut sites of this kind are scattered across the Burren in considerable numbers. They range from early prehistoric shelters to the remains of booley huts used in the seasonal practice of transhumance, where cattle were driven to upland grazing in summer and herders would follow, living temporarily in rough stone structures before returning to the lowlands in autumn. The Burren's unique karst geology, expanses of bare limestone pavement cracked into blocks called clints and grikes, preserves surface features unusually well, and the dryness of the terrain means that walls which might have vanished elsewhere can survive as recognisable outlines for centuries. Without further detail on this particular site, it is not possible to say whether the Gleninsheen hut belongs to the Bronze Age, the early medieval period, or a more recent pastoral tradition, and that ambiguity is itself part of what makes the Burren so compelling to archaeologists.