Built from boulders and surviving only one or two courses high, they are easy to overlook, which is perhaps why they have attracted so little attention.

The complex at Scarteen consists of these nine crudely built structures along with associated enclosures, all of boulder construction. Internal diameters range from 1.3 metres to 3.9 metres, suggesting a variety of uses rather than a single uniform purpose. The enclosures in particular point toward farming activity, and old field walls are still visible in the immediate vicinity, reinforcing the sense that this was once a working agricultural landscape rather than a settlement in any permanent sense. The site bears some resemblance to the kind of upland booley clusters found elsewhere in Ireland, temporary shelters used by those who brought livestock to higher ground during summer grazing, though the notes stop short of making that identification explicitly. What survives is fragmentary, but that fragmentation is itself informative: these were never grand structures, and the people who built them were working with whatever the mountain slope provided.