They are not the ruins of a settlement in any permanent sense, and that distinction is precisely what makes them worth pausing over. Their probable purpose was booleying, the seasonal practice of moving livestock to upland pastures in summer, with herders, often young people, accompanying the animals and living in temporary shelters for the duration. These booley huts were built to last a season, not a lifetime, which makes their survival all the more quietly remarkable.

Booleying was once widespread across Ireland, a form of transhumance that shaped the landscape in ways that are easy to overlook because the structures it left behind are so modest. The Letterdife huts, recorded by archaeologist and fieldworker M. Gibbons and published in Paul Gosling's Archaeological Inventory of County Galway, Volume I, in 1993, represent a practice that had largely died out by the twentieth century as land use patterns changed and the old rhythms of pastoral farming gave way to more settled arrangements. The huts themselves are unassuming, the kind of low stone shelters that blend into the hillside so completely that their age and purpose require a certain context to appreciate.