What makes them quietly interesting is the question they pose: are these earthen rises the eroded remains of dwellings once occupied by the people who built and used the fort? A ringfort, to give the basic context, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, built primarily during the early medieval period as a farmstead or settlement. Interior mounds of this kind are not always easy to interpret, and that ambiguity is part of what makes this site worth noting.

The possible identification of these mounds as hut sites rests on two sources separated by nearly a century. Theodor Westropp, the indefatigable antiquarian who surveyed and sketched monuments across Munster and Connacht in the early twentieth century, appears to have noted the hut sites at Heirhill during his fieldwork around 1909. Later, Toal's 1995 survey of Kerry antiquities returned to the question, cautiously suggesting that the interior mounds visible within the ringfort may correspond to what Westropp had recorded. The hedge of uncertainty in that assessment, the word "may", reflects how much can change at a site over the course of a hundred years, and how difficult it is to read earthworks that have settled, spread, and greened over across many centuries.