They are modest things, the smallest barely a metre and a half across, the largest reaching 3.2 metres in diameter, and they would be easy to pass without a second thought. But their arrangement and variation in size suggest they served more than one purpose, and that is what makes them worth pausing over.

Two of the structures are thought to have functioned as booley huts, the seasonal shelters used by those who drove cattle to upland grazing grounds during the summer months, a practice known in Irish as buailteachas and common across Ireland well into the nineteenth century. The remaining four were more likely animal pens or enclosures rather than human habitation, which places the site within a familiar pattern of transhumance, the rhythmic movement between lowland and highland pasture that shaped so much of rural Irish life. The site at Baile Ristín was documented in J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, Corca Dhuibhne, a work that catalogued the remarkable density of ancient and early historical remains across that part of Kerry.