They are easy to overlook: low, roughly oval outlines of dry-laid stone, the kind of thing that reads from a distance as a natural scatter of rock. The larger of the two survives to about sixty centimetres in height, with upright slabs set against its inner face as a form of revetment, a technique that both stabilises the wall and creates a slightly more finished interior surface. Its partner to the northwest stands only one course high, but retains two slabs placed on edge to mark an entrance on its southern side, the gap between them measuring just over a metre.

Drystone huts of this kind, built without mortar using whatever stone lay close to hand, appear across the uplands of the Iveragh Peninsula in some numbers. They are generally associated with transhumance, the seasonal movement of people and livestock to higher grazing ground during summer months, a practice known in Ireland as booleying. Shelters like these would have been temporary or semi-permanent, used by those minding cattle on the hill pastures rather than as permanent dwellings. The two structures at Gowlanes are recorded in A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan's archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula, published by Cork University Press in 1996, which catalogued the remarkable density of such remains across south Kerry. The interior dimensions of both huts are modest, each roughly two and a half metres at their widest, suggesting they were meant for shelter rather than comfort.