The structure measures just 3.5 metres in diameter, and what remains of its wall, which has slumped rather than tumbled, stands only between a quarter and half a metre high in places. It is the kind of thing that registers as a slight rise in the ground before it registers as anything made by human hands.

This is a hut site, a term that covers a broad range of small, circular or oval structures built from drystone, which means stone laid without mortar, and found across Ireland in upland settings. Their dates and functions vary considerably; some were seasonal shelters for those working high pasture, others served more permanent purposes, and precise dating is rarely straightforward without excavation. What gives this particular site some additional texture is its relationship to the landscape around it. A stretch of walling from a wider network of relict field boundaries, that is, the fossilised outlines of an earlier agricultural system now mostly swallowed by bog and rough pasture, runs along the northern arc of the hut. The two features belong together in some sense, remnants of a time when this exposed hillside was organised, worked, and occupied in ways that are now largely illegible.