Barely wider than a doorway and not much longer, it was built not as a dwelling or a shelter for people, but as a working station for horses being loaded with seaweed. The west wall has collapsed, but the lower course of roof corbels, the projecting stones that would have supported a corbelled roof built up in overlapping rings without mortar, still survives. The structure is rectangular, measuring over 2.7 metres in length and 2.6 metres in width, and was constructed entirely in drystone, the building technique ubiquitous across the Aran Islands where lime mortar was historically scarce.

According to Tim Robinson's 1980 work on the islands, the hut was used in the process of 'straddling' horses, a term referring to the fitting of a straw or wicker pannier, a type of basket frame slung across a horse's back, used to carry harvested seaweed up from the shore. Seaweed, or feamainn, was essential to Aran farming; spread across the bare limestone pavement, it was mixed with sand and composted over generations to create the thin pockets of soil in which crops could be grown. The hut would have provided a fixed point at which the panniers could be loaded or adjusted, the horse steadied in a confined space while the awkward work of balancing the load was carried out. Paul Gosling's 1993 archaeological inventory of west Galway, which records the structure formally, places it some 390 metres east of another recorded site in the Cill Mhuirbhigh area.