The structure is modest almost to the point of invisibility: a rectangular dry-stone shell, its walls surviving to about a metre in height, enclosing an interior space of roughly five metres by three. That compactness is the point. This is a booley hut, a seasonal shelter associated with the old Irish practice of booleying, or transhumance, in which farming families would move their cattle to upland grazing pastures during the summer months, living temporarily in rough stone huts while they tended the animals and made butter and cheese.

Booleying was once widespread across Ireland, a practical response to the rhythms of the pastoral year, and the Beara Peninsula, with its combination of lowland settlement and open hillside, was well suited to it. The huts that surveyors have identified across such landscapes are rarely grand. Dry-stone construction, the technique used here, requires no mortar; stones are selected and stacked with enough care to hold a wall upright against Atlantic weather, at least for the season it was needed. Wall thickness at Crumpane runs to about half a metre, sufficient for a temporary refuge rather than a permanent home. No date is recorded for this particular structure, which is typical; booley huts tend to resist precise dating, belonging instead to a long continuum of seasonal land use that persisted in parts of Ireland into the nineteenth century and in some places beyond.