Corbelling is an ancient building technique in which courses of dry stone are laid so that each projects slightly inward over the one below, eventually closing to form a domed or beehive-shaped roof without mortar or timber. The hut measures roughly 3.6 metres by 3.3 metres across and stands just 1.3 metres high, with walls about 1.2 metres thick. Its entrance, facing south and only 0.75 metres wide, is filled with stone now but would once have admitted a person at a crouch. Inside, a lintelled wall-niche sits in the north-eastern arc of the interior, a small recess formed by a horizontal stone set across an opening in the wall, the kind of feature that might have held a lamp, a vessel, or a small object of some significance.

The hut sits roughly 50 metres to the north-east of a caher, which is a stone-walled circular enclosure of the type common across early medieval Kerry, and it lies just below the terrace on which that enclosure stands. The spatial relationship between the two suggests the hut was a subsidiary structure, a place for sleeping, sheltering, or working within the broader economy of the caher settlement. Abutting the hut to the south-east is a small subcircular structure, barely a metre across, identified as a probable animal shelter. Together the three elements, the enclosure above, the hut on the slope, and the pen beside it, suggest a working farmstead rather than anything ceremonial, one organised around the modest but demanding routines of early agriculture in a coastal upland landscape.

The site takes its name from Cathair Samháin, and its position overlooking Lough Currane gives some sense of the terrain in which it was built and used. The lake lies in a broad glacially shaped valley, and the hut's westward orientation would have caught whatever light the afternoons offered in this frequently overcast corner of County Kerry.