Local tradition still held that its roof had once been corbelled, meaning built by layering stones inward and upward until they met at a central point, a technique requiring no mortar and capable of lasting millennia. That tradition turned out to be correct, but the full picture that emerged from later excavation was considerably more complex than a simple shepherd's hut, ancient or otherwise.

The structure is a clochan, a drystone beehive hut, set within a caher, a roughly circular stone enclosure. When excavators finally cleared the rubble from the interior, they found a hut 6.7 metres in internal diameter, which is a substantial space by the standards of early Irish stone building. It had not one entrance but three, two of them opposing and each 1.1 metres wide, with a third blocked off at the north. Beneath the collapse lay an occupation layer, a large central hearth-pit, and several hundred stake-holes, the ghostly impressions left by timber posts or hurdles that once divided or furnished the interior. The artefacts recovered added further texture: quern fragments used for grinding grain, scraps of sheet bronze, iron slag, and tuyère fragments, the nozzles through which bellows forced air into a forge. Someone, at some point, was working metal here. A flagged pathway flanked by low upright slabs ran between the caher entrance and the hut door. When Westropp visited in 1912 and Máire Henry in 1957, they each noted a large perforated slab outside the hut to the south-east, interpreted by Henry as a support for a timber door frame. That slab has since disappeared from view. One that remains inside the caher, measuring roughly 2.45 metres by 0.7 metres, carries two large circular depressions on its upper surface, the purpose of which has not been firmly established.