Circular hut sites of this kind are the traces of early settlement, often associated with seasonal or permanent occupation during the early medieval period, their walls typically built from dry-laid stone and their interiors small enough to be domestic in the most modest sense of the word.

The hut at Derrynafeana is recorded in O'Sullivan and Sheehan's archaeological inventory of south-west Kerry, published in 1996, where it appears as entry number 37 and is described as lying adjacent to and east of another structure. Beyond that adjacency, the specifics of the site's date, its builders, and the nature of the activity it once sheltered remain unrecorded in the published account. That is not unusual for sites of this type in Kerry, where the landscape holds a remarkable concentration of early remains, many of them documented but not yet excavated or fully interpreted.