They are corbelled structures, meaning their walls curve inward and upward without mortar, the stones overlapping until they meet at the top, a technique used by early Irish monks and hermits to create remarkably weatherproof shelters in exposed locations. The site looks westward over St Finan's Bay towards the Skelligs, those jagged Atlantic outcrops where early Christian monasticism in Ireland reached one of its most austere expressions.

The larger of the two huts measures 4.3 metres in internal diameter, the smaller 3.1 metres, and they communicate through a narrow passage just 0.7 metres wide. The wider hut also has its own independent entrance, a low opening facing south-east. The site sits within an area known locally as The Glen, a broad valley beneath the mountain, and carries the placename Cill Buaine, which points to a church or sacred enclosure associated with St Buonia, also recorded as Beoanigh. Local tradition holds that she was a sister of St Patrick, though it has also been proposed, drawing on O'Donoghue's 1893 account, that the site was founded by St Brendan of Clonfert or by his disciple St Beoanus. The overlap of competing saints in the same location is not unusual in Kerry; the Iveragh Peninsula was thickly settled by early Christian communities, many of them preserving local memory only in fragmentary and contested form.

The site is not straightforward to examine closely. Permission to survey it was refused when the Iveragh archaeological survey was being compiled in the 1990s, and published descriptions rely on earlier accounts by Lynch, writing in 1902, and the art historian Françoise Henry, whose 1957 work on early Irish art and monasticism remains a significant point of reference. That the huts survive at all, and that their dimensions and construction details are known even at a remove, is largely thanks to those two sources.