They are corbelled structures, meaning their walls curve inward as they rise, with overlapping stone courses eventually closing to form a roof without the use of mortar or timber. Three of the huts are roughly subcircular in plan, one is rectangular, and all were built with their entrances facing east. Stone collapse surrounds each one; two have also fallen in on themselves internally. The shelf on which they stand appears to have been revetted, that is, reinforced with a retaining wall, along its northern side, suggesting that whoever built here was working deliberately with the terrain rather than simply occupying whatever flat ground was available.

Structures of this kind are found across the uplands of the Iveragh Peninsula in south Kerry, and are generally associated with seasonal habitation, most likely connected to the practice of booleyingthe movement of cattle and their herders to higher pastures during summer months. The four huts at Canburrin are compact but, by the account of those who have surveyed them, carefully made. The largest measures three metres in diameter with walls surviving to around a metre in height and a metre in thickness; the smallest retains only half a metre of standing height. The consistency of the eastward-facing entrances across all four suggests a shared design intention rather than casual construction, and the revetted shelf implies a degree of planning in how the site as a whole was laid out. The Iveragh Peninsula Archaeological Survey, compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan and published by Cork University Press in 1996, records this group as a coherent cluster, catalogued among the many early sites that reward attention across this part of Kerry.