Six buildings survive in the lowest of these fields, and two of them are thought to have served as animal shelters rather than human habitation, a detail that hints at a working farmstead rather than a simple seasonal refuge. Just outside the field boundary, and adjacent to one of the main structures, lies a collapsed circular mound of stone measuring roughly 2.1 by 1.4 metres, its original purpose now unclear beneath centuries of subsidence and weather.

The site was documented as part of the archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan and published by Cork University Press in 1996. The Iveragh Peninsula, the large westward-jutting landmass in County Kerry that includes the Ring of Kerry, contains an unusually dense concentration of early settlement remains, many of them associated with transhumance, the seasonal movement of people and livestock between lowland and upland grazing areas. The combination of enclosed fields, probable shelters for animals, and a collapsed stone feature at Canburrin fits comfortably within that tradition, though the precise date of the settlement has not been firmly established from the available record.