Built without mortar in the dry-stone tradition, its walls have outlasted whatever their original purpose was, and at some point in the island's farming history, someone decided they were perfectly serviceable as a sheepfold. The structure now sits at the junction of two field boundaries near the centre of the island, absorbed into the agricultural landscape so thoroughly that it takes a moment to recognise it as something considerably older than its current function suggests.

The hut measures 6.1 metres north to south and 5.8 metres east to west internally, giving it a roughly square footprint of a kind associated with early historic or medieval island settlement in the west of Ireland. Its entrance, just under a metre wide, faces the north-east. Church Island itself is one of several small islands along the Kerry coast with traces of early ecclesiastical and domestic occupation, and a hut of this form sitting at a field boundary junction points to a long continuity of use, where prehistoric or early medieval fabric has simply been incorporated into later land management without ceremony or record. Aidan O'Sullivan and John Sheehan documented the structure in their 1996 archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula, published by Cork University Press, which remains a key reference for the dense scatter of monuments across this part of south Kerry.