What makes the site quietly compelling is not dramatic preservation but the opposite: the way these huts survive only as suggestions, their walls collapsed and their shapes barely legible, clinging to the remains of a cashel that has itself largely fallen.

A cashel is a stone-walled enclosure, the early medieval equivalent of a farmstead boundary, built to define and protect a domestic space. At Keernaun, the cashel wall is the frame around which the three huts were arranged, and in at least one case, built directly into. The first structure sits just inside the cashel wall at the south-south-west, a subrectangular space running roughly north to south and measuring around five metres in length, its outer stone face still just about readable in the rubble. Further around the enclosure to the north-north-east, a second hut sits directly on the line of the collapsed cashel wall; it is roughly circular, with a diameter of only 1.35 metres, barely large enough to stand in. Immediately south of that comes a third, rectangular in plan, oriented north-west to south-east, about 2.9 metres long and 1.7 metres wide, and like its neighbour apparently constructed using the cashel wall as one of its sides. The practice of building smaller ancillary structures against or into a cashel wall is well attested across early medieval Ireland, making economic use of existing stonework and perhaps taking advantage of the shelter a standing wall provides.

The site is poorly preserved by any measure, and a casual eye might pass over it entirely. What remains is rubble, grass, and geometry, the kind of archaeology that rewards patience and a willingness to read a landscape slowly.