What makes them quietly remarkable is their construction method: each is corbelled, meaning the walls were built from dry stone with each successive course of rock projecting slightly inward until the structure closed overhead without mortar or timber. Three of the huts are subcircular in plan, one rectangular, and all were carefully oriented with their entrances facing east, a detail that suggests deliberate, considered building rather than improvised shelter.

The site sits on a natural shelf in the hillside, which appears to have been deliberately revetted, that is, reinforced with a stone facing wall, along its northern edge to create a more stable platform. Stone collapse fans out around each hut, and two have fallen in on themselves internally, leaving their interiors choked with rubble. Despite that decay, the quality of the original construction is still legible in the standing fabric. Corbelled stone huts of this kind are found at a number of locations across the Iveragh Peninsula and along the wider western seaboard of Ireland; they are associated variously with early medieval monastic settlements, seasonal pastoral activity, and later refuges, though without excavation it is rarely possible to assign a precise date or function to an individual group. The Canburrin huts have not, on current evidence, been firmly dated. One of the huts in the group measures approximately three metres in diameter and retains a wall height of around one metre, with walls about one metre thick, giving some sense of the scale involved: these were compact, purposeful structures, low and solid against the Atlantic weather.