It is an easy thing to walk past without registering what it is. The footprint measures just 3.2 metres north to south and 2 metres east to west, roughly the floor space of a garden shed, and the rubble that has slid inward over time partially obscures even that modest interior. Only the drystone walling, built without mortar in the rough-and-ready manner of field shelters and seasonal bothies across upland Ireland, still traces the outline of what was once an enclosed space.

The entrance, now collapsed and narrowed to around 0.4 metres in width, faces north, which is an unusual orientation given that north-facing openings offer little shelter from prevailing weather. Whether this reflects a practical logic now lost, a response to the local topography, or simply the constraints of the slope, is difficult to say. The structure sits in rough hill grazing on heather-covered ground, and the shallow bog has crept up around the lower courses of the wall, preserving them in part while slowly obscuring the whole. Drystone hut sites of this kind are scattered across the uplands of Cork and Kerry, associated variously with transhumance pastoralism, the seasonal movement of livestock to summer pastures, or with the marginal agricultural activity that intensified during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries under population pressure.