These are the remains of a booley village, a form of seasonal settlement once common across Ireland and the broader Atlantic fringe of Europe. Booleying, from the Irish word buaile, was the practice of driving cattle to remote upland pastures in summer, with herders following and living temporarily on the land while the lower ground recovered. The village at Keel is an unusually complete example of what that seasonal life looked like in physical form.

The settlement divides into two distinct groupings along both banks of the stream. The northern cluster contains nine huts arranged in a rough line, each built of drystone, meaning no mortar was used, just carefully stacked rough stones and boulders. The walls, about 0.6 metres thick, still stand to between one and 1.4 metres in many places. The huts are rectangular or oblong, most with gently rounded corners, orientated north to south, and typically entered through a doorway set in the centre of the west wall. Several were divided internally by a partition wall into two rooms, and most contain at least one slab-lined recess built into the wall thickness, a kind of inbuilt cupboard. About 40 metres upslope to the south, a second grouping of six or seven smaller huts makes use of the gully itself, with most having one wall built directly against the vertical gully slope. Beyond the huts proper, there is a rough shelter to the north-east that takes advantage of a natural rock outcrop, where a projecting slab of stone serves as a roof, with only a single rough stone wall needed to enclose the space. A roughly square stone enclosure nearby, measuring approximately 15 metres by 12 metres, was most likely used as a pound for livestock, completing the functional logic of the whole settlement.

The site sits on open, unenclosed ground, and approaching it means crossing the kind of terrain the herders themselves would have known, boggy and exposed, with the cliffs audible rather than always visible. The detail that rewards close attention is the wall cupboards: small, deliberate, domestic. They are a reminder that what looks like a rough temporary camp was, for part of each year, an organised and inhabited place.