It measures just 3.2 metres north to south and 1.7 metres east to west, defined by the remains of a collapsed drystone wall, and it sits roughly 75 metres west of the main enclosure that occupies the summit plateau. This is one of several hut sites clustered at the north-western and western end of the summit, the remnants of structures that once sheltered people at one of Ireland's most visited high places, long before the annual barefoot pilgrimage became the dominant story told about the mountain.

When archaeologists excavated this particular hut site in 1995, what they found beneath the surface was modest but telling. The collapsed wall had lost its inner and outer faces entirely, leaving only a rubble core. Underneath the thin layer of sod inside the structure, a shallow peaty deposit lay directly on bedrock. Within that peaty layer, excavators recovered a retouched flint flake, a chert flake, and a chert chip. Worked flint and chert, both types of fine-grained stone shaped for use as tools or blades, are the kind of finds that tend to resist easy dating on their own, but their presence suggests human activity at the summit stretching back well before the early Christian period with which Croagh Patrick is most commonly associated. A second hut site, excavated separately, lies approximately 100 metres to the north-east, indicating that this western end of the summit once supported a small community of structures rather than a single isolated building.