None of the walls at Scarteen survive more than a course or two of boulders high, and the largest of the enclosures measures less than four metres across internally, with the smallest barely wider than a person is tall. That combination of number and variety, nine distinct structures clustered together in rough boulder construction, is what lifts the site out of the ordinary.

The complex occupies the hillside midway between Knocklomena and Boughil mountains on the Iveragh Peninsula, a part of south Kerry that preserves an unusually dense record of early human activity. The structures are not thought to be domestic in origin, at least not primarily. Their internal dimensions and arrangement suggest they relate instead to farming, perhaps the kind of seasonal upland agriculture, sometimes called booley farming, in which communities moved livestock to higher ground in summer and built temporary shelters and pens to manage them. Old field walls survive nearby, lending weight to that reading. The buildings themselves are crude by any measure, functional rather than carefully crafted, put up with whatever boulders lay close at hand and not intended to last in the way that a house might be.

The site sits on a steep slope, which shapes the approach and the experience of being there. The low remains are easy to overlook at ground level but become more legible once you have found one structure and begin scanning the immediate ground for the others. The surrounding field walls, half-collapsed and grass-covered, extend the picture of what this small pocket of hillside was once asked to do.