The remains are modest: a collapsed wall, roughly 1.4 metres wide, tracing a circle with an internal diameter of just 5.8 metres. That is a small space by any measure, tight enough that the whole interior could be crossed in a few strides, yet enough for shelter, for a fire, for daily life in early medieval Ireland.

The structure sits within a rath, an enclosed farmstead of the kind built across Ireland during the early medieval period, typically between the sixth and twelfth centuries. A rath generally consists of an earthen or stone bank enclosing a roughly circular area, and the hut at Garranearagh is the domestic core of just such an enclosure. The floor level inside is even, which suggests it has not been significantly disturbed, and what remains of the hut wall has simply collapsed outward or inward over time rather than been robbed away for later building. The archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula, compiled by Aidan O'Sullivan and Jerry Sheehan and published by Cork University Press in 1996, recorded the site as part of a broader mapping of an area extraordinarily dense with prehistoric and early historic remains.