Nobody knows exactly when people lived here. The structures sit within a wider complex of middens, the accumulated shell and refuse heaps left by communities who harvested the sea over long periods, and that association is perhaps the most telling detail: these were people living close to the shoreline, eating from it, and building beside it.

At least three distinct structures have been identified across the site, each slightly different in form. Near the north-eastern part of Doonloughan Bay there is a square hut measuring roughly 4.4 metres on each side, accompanied by a rectangular annexe to its north. Closer to the southern end of False Bay, a circular hut of around 3 metres in diameter retains traces of a centrally placed hearth and a doorway facing east, giving a more immediate sense of the interior life that once went on inside. A third structure, at the southern limits of the midden complex, survives only as a broad, irregular spread of boulders roughly 25 metres across. Waddell noted these remains in 1977, and a subsequent survey by Gibbons and colleagues in 1988 raised the count to at least five huts across the area. The mix of circular and square plans is itself of some interest: circular huts are the more typical form in prehistoric and early historic Ireland, while square or rectilinear structures tend to point towards different periods or cultural influences, though without secure dating evidence, it is difficult to draw firm conclusions here.

The structures offer little drama on the ground. What survives is genuinely fragmentary, and the site rewards the kind of visitor who is content to read a scatter of boulders against a backdrop of bay and bog, rather than one expecting upstanding walls or clear outlines.