Look more carefully and an oval shape begins to resolve itself from the rubble, roughly eight metres along its longer axis and six across, the tumbled outline of a drystone wall, where the lowest course still shows the large boulder-type stones that once formed its base. The interior is uneven pasture now, the wall long since collapsed into a jumbled spread, but the form of the structure is legible enough to record.

What exactly this hut site was, or when it was built and abandoned, the ground itself does not say. Drystone hut sites of this kind, small oval or circular shelters built without mortar, occur across upland and marginal land throughout Ireland, and date from a wide range of periods, from the early medieval centuries back into prehistory. They were typically built for shelter during seasonal grazing or agricultural work, temporary structures by nature, which is partly why so few survive in anything other than this kind of collapsed state. What makes the Derreenacrinnig example quietly interesting is its company. A second hut site lies approximately thirty-five metres to the north, and a third around twenty-five metres to the south-west. Three such structures within a short distance of one another on the same rough hillslope suggests something more like a small cluster of activity than an isolated accident of survival, a pocket of the landscape that was once, in some modest and probably seasonal way, in regular use.