These are booley huts, the seasonal dwellings used during the old Irish practice of transhumance, in which farming communities would move their cattle to higher grazing ground in summer and send herders, often young women and boys, to live among the animals for the season. The shelters were never meant to be permanent, and most were built without mortar, simply stacking whatever stone lay nearby. That these examples still read clearly in the landscape, assembled from the varied granites of the Wicklow uplands, makes them notably well-preserved representatives of a way of life that largely vanished across Ireland by the nineteenth century.

The scholar F. H. A. Aalen, writing in 1963, singled out the Knocknadroose examples as particularly good specimens of the type, noting the range of boulder sizes and the informal but functional variety in their ground plans. They appear to sit to the north of Carricknagross graveyard, within what is now planted forestland. A booley site recorded separately by Con Costelloe in the same general location may well be the same cluster that Aalen described, suggesting the spot was noticed independently by more than one researcher working across different decades. Aerial photography taken in July 2013 confirmed that several hut outlines remained visible from above, their stone footprints still legible despite the encroachment of plantation trees around them.