What survives is modest but legible: a drystone structure, built without mortar by stacking and fitting stones, with a basal row of upright slabs set on edge forming the base of the wall. The entrance, facing south-east, is less than a metre wide, and the interior diameter is just 3.2 metres across. It is, in other words, a very small space, built by someone who needed shelter on high, exposed ground rather than comfort.

Structures like this are difficult to date without excavation. Circular drystone huts of this kind appear throughout Irish uplands and can belong to almost any period, from the early medieval era through to the post-medieval practice of transhumance, known in Irish as buailteachas, whereby people and cattle moved to higher summer pastures. The location here, immediately beneath the cliffs at the head of one of Kerry's most dramatic mountain passes, suggests a working shelter rather than a permanent dwelling. The walls, still standing to around 0.6 metres in height and 1.2 metres thick, speak to the solidity of the original construction even in their ruined state. The thickness of the wall relative to the small internal space is typical of mountain huts built to resist wind and cold rather than to provide room to move.