Only about a quarter of the original circle survives, with a diameter of roughly eight metres, but that partial ring is enough to suggest the form: a small, seasonal shelter used by those who brought livestock to summer pastures in the hills. Booleying, from the Irish word buaile meaning a milking place or upland grazing ground, was a transhumance practice common across Ireland well into the nineteenth century, with herdsmen and women living in simple stone or turf shelters while their cattle grazed the higher ground through the warmer months.

The site was excavated in 1979, and what came out of the ground was modest but telling. Sherds of nineteenth and twentieth-century pottery and a single fragment of iron suggested the hut was in use long after the medieval period, placing it firmly within the living memory of communities who still moved seasonally between lowland farms and upland pastures. That continuity is part of what makes booley sites worth attending to; they are not remote antiquities but traces of a way of life that persisted into a recognisably modern era before quietly disappearing. By the time surveyors visited Carrignamuck again in 1990, the surrounding area had already begun to change, and the site has since been swallowed up by commercial forestry planting, which now covers much of this part of the Wicklow uplands.