Some are huts, one has been converted into a sheepfold, and at least two are most likely lamb shelters. The ensemble reads less like a settlement than like a working landscape that accumulated over time, each structure adjusted or added as the needs of whoever farmed or grazed here shifted.

The lowest of the four fields contains six recorded structures. The most substantial is a roughly circular hut measuring about 4.2 metres by 3.4 metres, with walls still standing to 1.4 metres in places and nearly a metre thick. Large upright slabs, known as orthostats, line its inner wall-face, and a second parallel row of them defines an entrance passage, 0.8 metres wide, facing east. Immediately to its west, a rectangular hut has had its western half reworked as a sheepfold, with similar upright slabs along the inner walls and a marked entrance passage to the north. Nearby, a collapsed circular mound of stone roughly 2 metres across sits just outside the field boundary, its original purpose now unclear. Two lintelled structures, roofed with flat capstones laid across upright walls, are interpreted as lamb shelters; one of them is built from two massive upright slabs on its north side alone. A seventh structure recorded by Henry in 1957 is no longer visible on the ground, absorbed, presumably, back into the hillside.

The site forms part of a wider archaeological landscape on the Iveragh Peninsula documented by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan in their 1996 survey of south Kerry. What makes Canburrin quietly interesting is precisely this layering, a place where domestic and agricultural functions overlapped and were renegotiated in stone, leaving behind a small, compressed record of pastoral life that is difficult to date with precision but easy enough to read, once you know what you are looking at.