The structure is roughly circular, measuring just under five metres across, with a wall so reduced by time that it barely rises above the surrounding bank. What makes it quietly puzzling is a detail of its floor: the interior sits about twenty centimetres higher than the ground outside, a characteristic more consistent with an ancient hut site than with any incidental feature of the landscape.

Circular hut sites of this kind are among the more elusive categories of early settlement in Ireland, typically comprising the collapsed remains of a dry-stone or turf-walled dwelling, often from the early medieval period or earlier. The jumbled nature of the walling here, protruding most clearly along the southern arc, suggests long deterioration rather than deliberate clearance. Yet the site appears to have found a second life at some point in the more recent past. The hillside above Bantry Bay is scattered with turf stands, small enclosures or platforms used for stacking and drying cut turf before it was carried down for fuel, and this particular structure may well have been pressed into exactly that use. The original builders could hardly have anticipated that their walls would one day serve as a windbreak for drying peat.