A low rise, no more than thirty centimetres at its highest, traces a roughly trapezoidal outline across the pasture, measuring about eight metres east to west and seven metres northwest to southeast. Two stones rest along this rise, one at the southern corner standing around eighty centimetres tall, the other lying further to the west. That is almost everything visible. And yet this modest disturbance in the turf is the surviving footprint of what was once a hut, a structure whose walls have long since collapsed or been cleared, leaving only the faintest suggestion of an enclosure.

Hut sites of this kind are the most unassuming of Ireland's ancient remains. The term refers simply to the ground-level traces of a former dwelling or shelter, where the walls, typically built from stone, turf, or a combination of both, have reduced over centuries to low earthen banks or scattered uprights. Without excavation it is rarely possible to say with certainty when a particular example was in use, and this one at Ballynacarriga is no exception. What gives it a slightly more layered character is its proximity to a boulder burial lying roughly thirty-four metres to the north. A boulder burial is a prehistoric monument type in which a large capstone is placed directly on the ground or on small supporting stones, with no substantial chamber beneath, and their distribution in West Cork places them broadly within the Bronze Age. Whether the hut and the burial were ever related in use or in time is unknown, but their closeness on the landscape is at least worth noting.

The site sits in ordinary farmland, and the physical evidence on the ground asks a great deal of the visitor's imagination. The view westward to the sea is the most immediately readable thing about the place.