It measures around 4.5 metres north to south and 5.7 metres east to west, which is modest even by the standards of early medieval domestic architecture. The trees planted across the interior of the enclosure have done what trees tend to do over time, softening edges, lifting soil with roots, and making it genuinely difficult to read what lies beneath the surface.

The structure sits within a ringfort, the type of enclosed farmstead that served as the basic unit of rural settlement in Ireland from roughly the early medieval period onward. Ringforts, which are typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches arranged in a rough circle, were built by farming families and housed both people and livestock. The hut site at their centre here at Freahanes is described as possible rather than certain, which is an honest qualifier; without excavation, a low curving earthwork inside an overgrown enclosure can be difficult to distinguish definitively from natural undulation or later disturbance. The horseshoe plan, however, is consistent with a class of early structure known from other ringfort interiors across Munster, where walls of stone or compacted earth were raised in a partial arc, sometimes leaving one side open toward a hearth or entrance.