What makes it slightly odd is what has happened to it in the intervening centuries since anyone last used it as a shelter: a lintelled lamb pen has been slotted into the gap left by the ruin, repurposing the old structure with a farmer's practical logic. The original wall, built without mortar in the dry stone tradition, now stands only about seventy centimetres high, but its semicircular plan survives clearly enough, measuring roughly three metres across.

Dry stone huts of this type are scattered across the uplands and peninsulas of south-west Ireland, associated variously with early medieval settlement, transhumance grazing, and the movement of seasonal herders across summer pastures. The Iveragh Peninsula, which forms the largest of the great fingers of land pushing into the Atlantic from County Kerry, is particularly dense with such remains, and A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan documented this example as part of their comprehensive archaeological survey of the area, published by Cork University Press in 1996. The walls at Coomduff, with a recorded thickness of around two metres, suggest a structure built to last rather than a temporary windbreak, though its precise date and the lives of those who used it remain unknown.