The shape itself is telling: a D-plan hut, with one straight wall formed by an existing boundary and a curved wall closing off the remaining sides, was a common and practical form of rough shelter in upland and marginal landscapes across Ireland. This particular example measures just 2.9 metres by 2.4 metres internally, with walls around a metre thick, which gives some sense of how snug, or perhaps how cramped, the interior would have been. A narrow entrance gap, only 0.75 metres wide, opens to the northeast.

The hut abuts a field wall that runs for approximately 150 metres nearby, though much of that wall has been swallowed gradually by the bog, leaving only the upper portion visible above the waterlogged surface. That slow submersion is itself a detail worth sitting with: the bog has been rising around these structures for long enough to bury significant masonry, preserving it in one sense while obscuring it in another. The huts at Derrycarna appear in A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan's archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula, published by Cork University Press in 1996, which catalogued the extraordinary density of early and medieval remains across this part of south Kerry. Whether the huts were seasonal shelters for herdsmen practising transhumance, the movement of livestock between lowland and upland grazing, or served some other function, the record does not specify, but that ambiguity is fairly typical of sites like this.