It is barely knee-height at its tallest point, its walls standing only about a quarter of a metre high, yet the deliberate geometry of the structure is hard to miss once you are looking for it. Someone shaped this place carefully, cutting the floor roughly twenty centimetres into the hillside along the western and northern arc so that the interior would sit level despite the slope, and raising a wall of stone and low upright slabs around an oval interior measuring just over three metres east to west and a little under three metres north to south.

Hut sites of this kind, essentially the footprints of small dry-stone shelters, are found across upland areas throughout Ireland, though their precise dating is often difficult to establish without excavation. They may belong to any number of periods, and were used variously by people working the land seasonally, tending livestock on summer pastures, or simply occupying marginal ground during particular stretches of history. The care taken here with the cutting of the interior into the hillside suggests a degree of intention beyond a purely temporary windbreak. A second hut site of the same type survives roughly fifty metres to the south, which hints that this part of the Maulin slopes once supported at least a small cluster of activity rather than a single isolated structure.