What makes it quietly puzzling is its shape: roughly fifteen metres long from east to west but only about two and a half metres wide, a proportions so extreme that the structure reads less like a dwelling and more like a corridor left in stone. The walls survive to around a metre and a half in places, and a doorway is still visible in the middle of the southern wall, but the building's purpose remains genuinely uncertain.

The Ordnance Survey's first edition maps, produced in the mid-nineteenth century, show no trace of it, while the second edition records it already as roofless, which places its construction and abandonment within a fairly compressed window. That same period coincides with the construction of the Healy Pass road, the dramatic mountain route that crosses the Caha Mountains between Cork and Kerry. One possibility is that the building served as basic accommodation for the labourers working on the road. Another, perhaps older, reading is that it predates the road entirely and functioned as a refuge for people crossing the mountain before any formal route existed, a waypoint in a landscape that offered very little shelter. The two explanations are not entirely incompatible; a pre-existing shelter could have been pressed into service again during the road works. The unusually narrow plan, perched directly on rock rather than level ground, does not map neatly onto any conventional domestic or agricultural building type, which keeps both theories alive.