What makes the site at Canburrin quietly remarkable is not any single monument but the ensemble: four huts and a large circular enclosure set within an extensive field system, the whole arrangement suggesting a community that once organised itself carefully across this sloping ground.

The remains include the rough stone foundations of a rectangular hut measuring around 2.2 metres across, positioned about five metres to the south-west of the larger circular enclosure. Such groupings of hut foundations and field systems are characteristic of early agricultural settlement in the west of Ireland, where communities cleared, divided, and worked the land over centuries, leaving behind low earthen and stone boundaries that only become legible at a certain scale. The Iveragh Peninsula, of which this valley forms a part, is densely scattered with this kind of evidence, much of it recorded in the 1996 archaeological survey of south Kerry compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan. The Carhan river valley setting, at the head of a sheltered inland route on the peninsula, would have made this a practical location for a small farming settlement, close to water and reasonably protected from the worst Atlantic weather.