The older structure sits against the northern wall of a rectilinear cashel, and without knowing what to look for, a visitor could easily read the whole arrangement as unremarkable field boundary work.

A cashel is a stone-walled enclosure, typically of early medieval date in the Irish context, and this one at Gleninsheen contained considerably more than a single dwelling. Within the same enclosure there are three further hut sites, along with what appears to be the possible foundations of a house, making the cashel not an isolated shelter but something closer to a small settlement cluster. The particular hut site abutting the northern wall is complicated by the later stonework laid over it, a fairly common predicament in Irish field archaeology, where farming activity across successive centuries has a habit of incorporating, overlying, or simply borrowing from whatever was already standing.