It measures roughly nine metres north to south and eight metres east to west, and it is defined by a scarp, a low earthen edge, barely fifteen centimetres high on the interior. That is all that visibly remains of what was, in all likelihood, someone's home.

A rath, sometimes called a ringfort, is an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, typically bounded by an earthen bank and ditch, and thousands survive across Ireland in varying states of preservation. The Carrownteane example is one such enclosure, and this possible hut site extends into its interior from the north-west, sitting at a level slightly lower than the surrounding ground inside the rath. The floor is level, suggesting a deliberate surface rather than simple subsidence, and the relationship between the structure and the rath implies they may have been broadly contemporary, part of the same agricultural and domestic world. No original entrance survives in any recognisable form, so whoever passed through the doorway of this small rectangular space left no obvious trace of how they came and went.