It outlines a roughly rectangular space, measuring about 5.8 metres north to south and 2.8 metres east to west, its interior now choked with rushes and heather, its walls barely 0.6 metres high and draped in the same heather that surrounds them. The whole thing sits inside a coniferous wood, which gives the site an added layer of strangeness: trees planted for commercial forestry now shade a structure that almost certainly predates them by centuries.

What survives is the footprint of a hut site, the kind of small, functional stone-walled shelter associated throughout Ireland with seasonal or semi-permanent occupation of marginal land. The bog has crept up around it over time, preserving the wall line by effectively locking the lower courses in place. What makes the Canburrin site particularly suggestive is that it does not stand alone. A second hut site lies roughly two metres to the north, and immediately beyond that is the south-western corner of a stone enclosure. The clustering of these features points to something more organised than isolated refuge: a small settlement, or at least a working landscape, that once made purposeful use of this damp hillside.