Its three surviving walls still stand to a height of around 0.7 metres, with a thickness of roughly a metre, enclosing an interior that measures 4.45 metres east to west and at least 3.30 metres north to south. What makes the structure quietly compelling is not its size but its position and its company: it abuts another small hut to the south, suggesting that what remains here is a fragment of a cluster rather than a solitary building.

Church Island sites in Kerry are typically associated with early medieval monastic or hermitic settlement, where communities of monks would establish small enclosures of cells and oratories on islands both for isolation and for the symbolic weight of the sea crossing. A cell, in this context, is simply a small single-roomed structure used for sleeping or prayer, the most basic unit of early Irish monastic life. The pairing of this building with a neighbouring hut hints at that kind of arrangement, though the date of construction has not been firmly established. The archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula, compiled by Aidan O'Sullivan and John Sheehan and published by Cork University Press in 1996, recorded the structure but stopped short of assigning it a period with confidence.