The southern and western foundations of a rectangular building, roughly 6.4 metres east to west and 5.2 metres north to south, survive to an average height of just 0.2 metres. That is not much more than a course or two of stone, but the footprint is legible, and drystone construction, which uses no mortar, relying instead on the careful fitting of stones against one another, was the standard technique for such structures across early medieval Ireland.

The building sits to the south of the centre of a wider ecclesiastical enclosure, the kind of roughly circular or oval boundary that would have defined a monastic or early Christian religious site. Within such enclosures, small rectangular huts typically served as cells or workshops for the community that occupied the site. This one at Cool was documented as part of the comprehensive archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula carried out by Aidan O'Sullivan and John Sheehan, published by Cork University Press in 1996, a survey that catalogued the remarkable density of early Christian and prehistoric remains across South Kerry. The building is described as poorly preserved, which is honest; time, weather, and the reuse of loose stone by later generations have taken their toll.