A stone hut circle is a roughly round setting of upright stones, coursed slabs, or stone rubble which represents the foundations, and in some cases the walls, of a building which originally had a wooden and/or turf superstructure and roof. Traces of a doorway and flooring arrangements can sometimes be seen, and some more elaborate stone hut circles have annexes or forecourts of various sorts. Most stone hut circles were probably dwellings, but some may have been used for storage or as animal houses.
As a class, stone hut circles occur in isolation or in small groups. Identical structures also form components of many other classes of monuments, most notably unenclosed hut settlements, regular aggregate fieldsystems, irregular aggregate fieldsystems, coaxial fieldsystems, and numerous classes of enclosure. Stone hut circles that are clearly components of a monument of some other class (AP data and mapped information will be important in distinguishing these) are excluded from the analysis of stone hut circles as a class in their own right. It may, however, be noted that some stone hut circles which are components of other monument classes were, in origin, isolated structures which became incorporated within more complex monuments during the course of their lives. There is, however, no way of systematically identifying such examples on the basis of field evidence alone. For this reason any stone hut circle is regarded as a component of something else if it is physically part of a monument of another class (eg. set in the angle of two field boundaries or incorporated in a field boundary), or, in the case of enclosures, it lies within the enclosure boundary. The only exceptions are where there is clear stratigraphic evidence that a stone hut circle is earlier than or later than, and thus unconnected with, another class of monument.
Stone hut circles, especially poorly preserved examples, can sometimes be confused with ring cairns and other classes of circular ceremonial monuments. The thickness and construction of the walls and the presence of a doorway are, however, important characteristics of stone hut circles which allow them to be distinguished from other classes of monument.