The structure is modest in scale, roughly 4.8 metres east to west, with a curved stone wall no more than 0.4 metres high at its tallest point and a straight western side running 4.6 metres. What makes it quietly arresting is the contrast between its near-erasure and its legibility: the ground plan remains clear enough to read, the interior still level and grassed over, a small room-sized space that once kept wind and weather at bay for whoever used it.

Hut sites of this kind are simple single-cell shelters, typically built from dry-stone walling without mortar, and found across upland and marginal land throughout Ireland. They are associated variously with seasonal pastoral activity, the movement of cattle to summer grazing grounds known as booley land, or with the long periods when people worked and sometimes slept on the higher slopes. The Cloontreem example sits immediately against the eastern side of the northernmost of two relict field boundaries nearby, a spatial relationship that suggests the hut and the field system were part of the same working landscape, used together by the same people at the same time, even if that time is now difficult to pin down precisely. Relict field boundaries are the ghost outlines of former agricultural enclosures, visible as low earthen or stone banks that farming long since abandoned. Together, the hut and the boundaries preserve a fragment of organised land use on ground that is now rough hill pasture, the human effort that once shaped it largely reclaimed by the bog.