The hut measures only 4.5 metres in diameter, barely large enough for a family to shelter in, yet the care taken in its construction is still legible in the ground. Whoever built it solved the problem of the hillslope practically and without fuss: the interior floor was raised on the western side and cut into the upslope on the eastern side, creating a level living surface where the gradient would otherwise have made one impossible.

The structure belongs to a wider landscape of relict field boundaries in the surrounding area, faint outlines in the pasture that suggest this hillside was once organised, farmed, and inhabited. A hut site of this kind, a simple single-roomed stone dwelling, represents a form of rural occupation common across upland Ireland, though the exact period of use at Cloontreem is unrecorded. What survives is the lowest course of a dry-stone wall, now jumbled and spread, with a thickness of around 0.9 metres and a surviving height of roughly 0.45 metres. Rubble is scattered across the interior, the collapsed upper courses of walls that once stood considerably higher. The bog, which has crept up around and partially over the structure, has in some ways preserved it, holding the stones in place even as it obscures them.