Corbelling is a dry-stone building technique in which each successive course of stones projects slightly inward over the one below, eventually closing off to form a roof without mortar or timber. The result here is a near-circular structure measuring roughly four metres by three and a half, with walls a metre thick and standing just over a metre high at their best-preserved eastern side. What makes it quietly remarkable is not its size but its detail: two flanking slabs at the north-east may once have framed a doorway, and set just inside that threshold is a slab bearing a central depression, most likely the pivot-stone in which a door-post once rotated. A rectangular niche cut into the interior wall at the east, the kind of recess that could have held a lamp or a small object, suggests a domestic interior with considered arrangement rather than improvised shelter.

The structure was recorded as part of an archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan and published by Cork University Press in 1996, a survey that drew together an extraordinary density of early and medieval sites from this corner of south Kerry. Bentee itself is part of a landscape long used by people moving between upland grazing and coastal settlements, and the terrace on which the hut sits was almost certainly shaped by human hands to create a level platform on an otherwise steep slope. A pillar stone standing to the south-east of the hut has no firmly established purpose; it may be a boundary marker, a way-finder, or something more ritual in nature. Scattered around the hut are a number of U-shaped enclosures that may have served as animal shelters or small outbuildings, suggesting this was once the centre of a modest agricultural holding rather than a solitary hermitage or waystation.