The northern wall of the structure is not a wall at all in the conventional sense, but a natural outcrop of bedrock, incorporated directly into the design, making it genuinely difficult at first glance to say where geology ends and human intention begins.

The foundations are subcircular, roughly 3.5 metres by 3.1 metres, and survive to a height of about half a metre, with a wall thickness of 0.7 metres. The southern inner face is lined with orthostats, upright slabs of stone set on end to form a more deliberate interior surface. Structures of this type, small, single-roomed, built close to the ground and often associated with upland grazing, are found across Kerry and the wider west of Ireland, though dating them with precision is notoriously difficult without excavation. They may belong to any period from prehistory through to the post-medieval era of seasonal transhumance, when farming communities moved livestock to higher pastures during summer months. What is clear here is the pragmatic logic of the builder: the outcrop on the northern side would have provided both a ready-made wall and a degree of shelter from prevailing wind, reducing the labour required and making use of what the mountain already offered.