These are booley huts, the seasonal shelters used during transhumance, the custom of driving cattle to higher summer pastures and living alongside them until autumn. The examples at Knocknadroose are considered particularly fine, built from loose granite boulders in a range of forms, mostly rectangular but occasionally round or oval, fitted together without mortar in the drystone tradition.

When the historian Liam Price visited in 1949, he recorded one structure in some detail. It measured roughly fourteen yards long and seven yards wide, narrowing at one end, with drystone walls that had originally stood two or three feet high before later hands built them up to five or six feet. A cross-wall had once divided the interior, creating a room about eight to ten feet broad at the wider end, though that partition was already gone by the time Price saw it. A doorway opened at the south-east corner, and to the east and south-east lay a small double enclosure, a haggard, the kind of enclosed yard used for storing or managing animals. Locally it was known simply as the Boolia House, a vernacular form of the word "booley" itself, which derives from the Irish buaile, meaning a milking place or summer pasture. Writing in 1963, the geographer F. H. A. Aalen singled out the Knocknadroose huts as especially good examples of their type. Aerial photography from 2013 still shows several hut platforms at the location, one of them a sub-rectangular structure sitting about 170 metres north-west of Carricknagross graveyard.