Most visitors to upland landscapes like this scan the horizon for the obvious drama of a hillfort wall, but the domestic texture of the settlement below is easily missed. One of these huts, oval in plan and measuring roughly 4.8 metres north to south and 7.5 metres east to west, survives as a low bank of grass- and moss-covered boulders about 1.3 metres wide, its northern edge sitting level with the ground outside.

The hut is part of the broader Spinans Hill hillfort complex, one of the more substantial prehistoric enclosure systems in the Wicklow uplands. Hillforts are large enclosed sites, typically defined by earthen or stone ramparts, whose precise function is still debated; some were permanently settled, others may have served as periodic gathering places or defended refuges. The Brusselstown Hill fort sits above this cluster of huts, and the relationship between the two is suggestive: the huts may represent the lived-in, workaday side of a landscape dominated at its upper edge by the more formal architecture of the rampart. The oval shape of the hut, defined by that low boulder bank, is a common form in prehistoric Irish upland settlements, where stone was plentiful and turf-cutting was unnecessary for construction.