A rath, for the uninitiated, is a roughly circular enclosure defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches, typically dating to the early medieval period in Ireland, and used as a farmstead or family settlement. Finding traces of a structure within one is not unusual in itself, but most raths have long since lost any surface evidence of the buildings they once sheltered. Here, the outline has survived, faint but legible.

The site was documented in an archaeological survey of the Ballinrobe district published in 1994 by Lavelle, which noted the possible circular hut as sitting within the interior of the enclosure. Its dimensions, approximately 4.1 metres north to south and 4.3 metres east to west, suggest a modest domestic structure, the kind of small round building that would have housed people, or perhaps animals, within the protected space of the rath boundary. The slight irregularity in its proportions, wider east to west than it is long north to south, is a small but telling detail, the sort of measurement that only a close survey on the ground would catch.