What makes it more than a farmer's improvisation is its construction: the walls are corbelled, meaning each course of stone projects slightly inward over the one below, the whole thing converging without mortar into a self-supporting dome. Someone built this with considerable skill, long before anyone thought to keep records of it.

The structure is circular, roughly two and a half metres across internally and surviving to a height of one and a half metres. Corbelled buildings of this type appear throughout the Dingle Peninsula and are associated with early medieval or possibly prehistoric occupation, when people working high ground for pasture, prayer, or both would shelter in exactly this kind of compact, durable cell. Brandon Mountain carries a particular weight of early Christian association, being linked to Saint Brendan, and the slopes below its summit are scattered with traces of that long habitation. Whether this hut is monastic in origin, a secular shepherd's refuge from an earlier age, or something else entirely, the fabric of the building itself has outlasted any record of who made it or why. That it now shelters sheep rather than people is perhaps the least surprising part of the story.