Corbelled drystone construction is a technique in which courses of unmortared stone are laid so that each projects slightly inward over the one below, eventually closing into a roof without any timber or mortar, a method used by early Irish monks who favoured remote, exposed locations of precisely this kind. The hut measures 5.8 metres in internal diameter, and its walls still stand to an internal height of 2.4 metres. At the south-east, a lintelled doorway 1.65 metres high retains its inclining jambs, and above the lintel on the inner face are two projecting stones, each with a circular perforation, designed to anchor a timber door frame. A wall-niche sits to the north, and on the outer face of the wall, just north of the doorway, a stone bears a circular depression that may once have held the base of a shutter for a window that has since been lost.

The site carries a tangle of early Christian associations. It is linked to St Buonia, also known as Beoanigh, who was locally reputed to have been a sister of St Patrick. A separate tradition, recorded by O'Donoghue in 1893, attributes the foundation to St Brendan, the sixth-century navigator monk, or to St Beoanus, his disciple. Whether any of these attributions reflects genuine historical memory or represents the kind of prestigious patronage that early medieval communities liked to claim for their holy places is impossible to say with certainty. What is clear is that the site sits within a landscape already dense with early monastic presence; from this slope, the Skelligs are visible to the west across St Finan's Bay, those sea-stacked rocks that carried their own extraordinary community of hermit monks well into the medieval period.