None of them rise more than one or two courses of boulder above the ground, so a casual eye might read them simply as rubble or the natural scatter of a rocky hillside. Their internal diameters range from roughly 1.3 metres to 3.9 metres, which places the smaller ones closer in scale to a storage cell than a dwelling, though the full picture of what went on here is harder to resolve.

The structures form what archaeologists would class as a hut site complex, a grouping of crudely built enclosures and shelters that was probably tied to seasonal or working use of the upland landscape rather than permanent habitation. The presence of old field walls in the immediate vicinity reinforces that reading; this appears to have been a working place, associated with farming or grazing activities rather than a settlement in any lasting sense. The Iveragh Peninsula, of which Scarteen forms a small corner, has long been understood to contain dense layers of such remains, with generations of people working the hills and leaving behind only the lowest courses of what they built. The boulder construction is typical of the area, where dressed stone would have been neither available nor necessary for structures intended to be functional rather than durable.