The structure is modest, roughly five metres by three metres internally, and whatever entrance it once had has long since disappeared into the ground. It is easy to walk past without registering it as anything deliberate, which is partly what makes it quietly arresting.

The footings are thought to be the remains of a booley house, a temporary shelter connected to the old Irish practice of booleying, known in Irish as buaile. Each summer, families would drive their cattle up to upland grazing pastures and live beside them for the season in simple structures like this one, returning to the valley farms in autumn. The practice was once widespread across Ireland's upland regions and persisted well into the nineteenth century, by which point commercial forestry had begun to claim many of these same hillsides. The plantation surrounding the site here in Aughvallydeag dates to that era, meaning the trees and the ruined walls arrived at roughly the same historical moment, one tradition ending as another industry was taking hold. The ravine to the east would have looked out over the river valley below, the same valley that the cattle and their herders descended to each autumn.