The structures are subtle enough that most people walking the hillside would read them as nothing more than a slight rise in the turf, yet from the air they resolve clearly into something deliberate and ancient, a domestic arrangement set down on this exposed slope by people who chose, or were obliged, to live at some remove from the valley below.

The enclosure sits about forty metres west of the Glencree River and contains two circular hut sites positioned in its south-western quadrant. Construction of this kind, using an earth and stone bank to define a living space with individual round structures inside, is characteristic of early settlement in upland Ireland, where communities farmed and grazed land that later centuries would abandon to blanket bog and rough pasture. Drystone field walls, built without mortar by carefully selecting and stacking stone, radiate outward from the south-south-west and south of the enclosure, suggesting that the huts were once at the centre of a small working landscape. Interestingly, the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, produced through successive editions from the nineteenth century onward, recorded the enclosure as an irregular-shaped field rather than identifying it as an archaeological feature, meaning it was mapped continuously without its true character being recognised. It took aerial imagery to make the circular forms of the huts legible again.