What makes it quietly puzzling is the gap between what it appears to be and what it may actually be. Nineteenth-century cartographers, working on the second edition of the Ordnance Survey map, recorded it simply as a sheep-fold. But the detail embedded in the structure suggests something older and more considered than a casual enclosure for livestock.

The foundation is circular, roughly 4.2 metres in diameter, built without mortar in the drystone tradition, where carefully selected and stacked stones hold each other in place through weight and fit alone. Within the thickness of the wall itself, two lintelled recesses have been formed, the larger measuring approximately 0.47 metres wide, 0.45 metres high, and 1.2 metres deep. These are not incidental gaps. A lintelled recess is a deliberate architectural feature, a niche or small alcove bridged by a horizontal capstone, of the kind found in early medieval and prehistoric structures across the Irish west. Their presence inside the wall thickness points towards a building designed for human use, most likely a seasonal hut associated with transhumance, the practice of moving livestock to upland grazing in summer months, when temporary shelters like this would have been occupied by those tending the animals. J. Cuppage's archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, published in 1986, documented the structure as part of a broader record of a landscape unusually dense with early remains.

The moorland setting above the Owenmore valley is still remote, and the Brandon range remains one of the less-visited parts of the Dingle Peninsula despite its considerable archaeological interest. The structure is unexcavated and undated with precision, so the gap between its probable original function and the sheep-fold label it eventually acquired on Victorian maps may never be fully closed.