They are corbelled structures, meaning their walls curve inward course by course until the stones meet overhead without mortar or timber, a building technique associated with early Christian monastic settlement in Ireland. The two huts are connected by a short lintelled passage less than a metre long, and the larger of the pair, roughly 4.3 metres across internally, has its own independent entrance facing south-east, just wide enough for a person to pass through sideways. The smaller hut measures 3.1 metres in diameter. From where they sit, the view opens westward across St Finan's Bay to the Skelligs, those jagged rock outcrops off the Kerry coast where a similar tradition of remote, austere monastic building survives in much better-documented form.

The site carries the name Cill Buaine, and it is associated with St Buonia, also rendered as Beoanigh, who local tradition holds was a sister of St Patrick. That is a significant claim, and an unprovable one, but it points to the early medieval roots of the site's reputation. Writing in 1893, O'Donoghue noted that alternative attributions also circulated, connecting the foundation either to St Brendan of Clonfert or to St Beoanus, recorded as a disciple of Brendan. The competing traditions suggest a site that mattered enough to be claimed by more than one strand of early Irish Christianity, even if the precise history has blurred over the centuries. Accounts by Lynch in 1902 and by the art historian Françoise Henry in 1957 remain among the few detailed records of the place, partly because access to carry out a full archaeological survey was refused, leaving the structural description reliant on earlier published work and summary notes.