It is easy to walk past without registering what it is. The structure measures just four metres east to west and 2.6 metres north to south, roughly the footprint of a large garden shed, and only one or two courses of its wall remain standing, reaching at most 0.8 metres in height. Yet the care with which it was built is still legible: whoever constructed it read the landscape carefully, using natural rock outcrops and the slope itself as ready-made shelter on the north and east sides, and raising the wall to its greatest height on the exposed southeast, where it sits directly on a projecting outcrop of bedrock.

This kind of small dry-stone hut site is a familiar, if poorly understood, feature of the Irish uplands. Such structures were likely used as seasonal shelters associated with farming or herding practices, though without excavation it is rarely possible to say more than that. This particular example came to light in 2016 when the firm John Cronin and Associates carried out a pre-development archaeological survey of the Grousemount area near Kilgarvan, ahead of a proposed wind farm project by ESB Wind Development. The survey was conducted under licence and involved systematic fieldwork across the development footprint, the kind of methodical ground-truthing that regularly turns up sites like this one, previously unrecorded and unknown outside local memory, if remembered at all.