The hut is roughly D-shaped in plan, a form common to early Irish settlement sites, and measures about 2.6 metres north to south. Its defining feature is a curving drystone wall, built without mortar by fitting stones carefully together, which stands to around 0.75 metres in height where it survives best along the east to south arc. Rubble from the collapsed upper courses lies scattered around the perimeter, and a narrow entrance, just half a metre wide, opens to the west.

What gives this particular site its quiet interest is not the structure alone but its immediate company. A second hut site sits only 12 metres to the south, and an enclosure of some kind lies 34 metres to the north-east, suggesting that what survives here is a fragment of a small cluster of activity rather than an isolated dwelling. Sites of this type are generally associated with early medieval settlement or seasonal pasturing, when people and their animals moved to upland grazing grounds during summer months, a practice known in Irish tradition as booleying. The undulating pasture around Knockowen Mountain still carries the character of marginal land, and the relationship between these three features, two hut sites and an enclosure within a short radius of one another, points to organised, if modest, use of this hillside at some point in the distant past.