It is not a grand structure. The walls survive to only about seventy centimetres in height, with a thickness of half a metre, and the interior measures roughly eight metres across. What it lacks in scale it makes up for in persistence, having outlasted whatever purpose once brought someone up to this exposed, wind-scoured shelf.

The structure is subcircular in plan, a shape common to early vernacular building in Ireland, where walls were laid without mortar and shaped to follow the lie of the ground rather than impose a geometry on it. Sitting directly on bedrock at such an altitude, it was almost certainly not a permanent dwelling. Structures like this on the high ground of Kerry are often associated with booleying, the seasonal practice of moving livestock to upland pastures in summer, with herdsmen or young people staying in temporary shelters close to the animals. The Iveragh Peninsula, surveyed in detail by archaeologists A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan and published by Cork University Press in 1996, contains a remarkable concentration of such features, traces of a way of using the landscape that continued in some areas well into the post-medieval period, though the origins of individual sites are rarely easy to date with precision.